秦始皇帝

Who collected this polling data? Have a link/source? From everything I’ve seen the east was firmly pro yanukovych and Crimea specifically formally petitioned for Russian intervension after the 2014 coup. And while the Donbass didn’t formally petition they literally went to war for the right to split away from Ukraine.

Thank you. Always glad when people enjoy/find what I have to say interesting.

Chiapas

Didn’t the Zapatistas disavow anarchism or otherwise deny they were anarchists or was that just hearsay?

A normal bourgeois state protects the independent political power of the bourgeoisie. China does not. A normal bourgeois state allows capital to dominate parties, media, courts, academia, elections, and foreign policy. China does not. A normal capitalist state treats private property as sacred. China does not. A normal imperialist state exports crisis through war, coups, sanctions, regime change, and military occupation. China does not. These differences are clearly not merely cosmetic or rhetoric as many compatible leftists would attempt to argue.

The article’s attack on pro-China Marxists as “camouflaging capitalism” is projection. It is Pröbsting and his acolytes and peers who in fact camouflages imperialist hierarchy by hiding it behind abstract equality of condemnation. He treats the imperial core and the anti-hegemonic periphery as if they occupy the same historical position. They obviously do not. The United States maintains hundreds of overseas military bases, weaponizes the dollar, sanctions entire populations, dominates global finance, backs settler colonialism, overthrows governments, and encircles China militarily. China builds ports, railways, grids, factories, hospitals, schools, and telecommunications. These are again clearly not materially equivalent.

This does not mean every Chinese project abroad is pure charity. Only children think geopolitics works that way. China pursues national interest, secures resources, competes, and at times makes hard bargains. But the actual question is whether China’s global role reproduces the colonial-imperialist structure or weakens it. And here reality is obvious: China regularly restructures debts, has cancelled or forgiven loans in multiple cases, and does not attach the classic IMF and Western conditionalities of privatization, austerity, deregulation, public-sector cuts, or political subordination. That is precisely why so much of the Global South prefers Chinese finance to IMF or Western-backed finance: not because China is charity, but because it offers room to build infrastructure and preserve sovereignty without handing the state over to foreign capital. On balance, China’s rise has weakened the monopoly of the imperialist core, expanded options for the Global South, and made it harder for Washington to dictate terms to the planet. This is precisely why the imperialist bloc has identified China as its central strategic threat.

Pröbsting’s method is also deeply Eurocentric. He looks at China from the standpoint of Western left purity politics, not from the lived history of oppressed nations trying to develop under siege. For rural people, minorities, peasants, workers, and colonized peoples, development is not an abstraction or something that can be glossed over. Roads, electricity, schools, hospitals, railways, food security, technological sovereignty, and national dignity are all matters of up most importance. Western Trotskyites can afford to sneer at these things because they inherit the infrastructure of imperial plunder. People from countries that were colonized, invaded, sanctioned, or kept poor do not have that luxury.

His use of the term “social-imperialism” is especially cheap. In the Marxist tradition, social-imperialism means socialism in words, imperialism in deeds. But words are not enough to prove deeds. Where are China’s colonies? Where are China’s regime-change wars? Where are its NATOs, its Iraqs, its Libyas, its Haitis, its Congos, its Chiles, its Palestines? Where is the Chinese global sanctions machine starving children to force privatization? Where is the Chinese military occupation network? Where is the Chinese equivalent of the IMF structural adjustment regime? Pröbsting cannot provide equivalence, so he substitutes analogy.

The same distortion appears in his attack on Monthly Review, John Bellamy Foster, Immanuel Ness, and Qiao Collective. His complaint is not merely that they make errors. His complaint is that they refuse to join the imperial chorus against China. This is the real crime for the compatible left: not bad theory, but bad alignment. They cannot tolerate Marxists who identify US imperialism as the principal enemy and understand China as a contradictory but historically progressive force in the present world struggle.

A serious Marxist critique of China would start from contradiction: socialist state power using markets; public ownership alongside private capital; national development under imperialist pressure; anti-poverty success alongside inequality; ecological transition alongside industrial strain; unity of a multiethnic state alongside real governance problems; international cooperation alongside strategic self-interest. That critique would be useful. Pröbsting however does not offer anything of the sort. He offers only a prosecution brief designed to collapse contradiction into condemnation.

The accusation that China is “capitalist” also ignores directionality. Capitalism in the imperial core is moving toward deeper monopoly rule, privatization, financial parasitism, austerity, militarism, and social decay. China is moving through state-led industrial upgrading, poverty eradication, infrastructure expansion, ecological planning, technological sovereignty, and increasing Party intervention into capital. These are not the same trajectory. To pretend otherwise is to replace historical materialism with static labeling.

His arguments also depend on a childish view of socialism as immediate purity. But every socialist revolution has had to retreat, maneuver, compromise, and use inherited forms. Lenin introduced the NEP. The Bolsheviks used concessions, trade, specialists, wages, markets, and state capitalism under proletarian dictatorship. Lenin did not conclude that the existence of markets automatically abolished Soviet power. He asked who controlled whom. That is the question Pröbsting avoids because the answer in China is inconvenient: capital exists, but it does not rule.

And here we reach the decisive point: Pröbsting’s Leninism is verbal, not methodological. He quotes categories but abandons concrete analysis. Lenin always began from the world situation, the principal enemy, the chain of imperialism, the division between oppressor and oppressed nations, and the strategic tasks of revolutionaries. Pröbsting begins from moral symmetry. That is why his conclusion is so useful to the West. He tells the left that opposing China is just as revolutionary as opposing Washington. In the real world, that means disarming anti-imperialism.

The compatible left always says: “We oppose both Washington and Beijing.” But Washington is the one encircling China with bases. Washington is the one arming Taiwan separatism. Washington is the one sanctioning countries across the world. Washington is the one backing Israel. Washington is the one that destroyed Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, and countless others. Beijing is not doing this to the world. A Marxism that cannot distinguish the arsonist from the firefighter because both have smoke on their clothes is not Marxism.

I find it ridiculous that anyone could accept Pröbsting’s framing, Spectre as a neutral Marxist source, the third-camp trick of equating the imperial core with the states resisting its domination, the flattening of Lenin into a checklist, the reduction of socialist transition to purity tests written by Western Trotskyites whose politics have never built, defended, or governed anything.

China is not beyond criticism. No socialist project is. But criticism must serve the people, the revolution, and the struggle against imperialism. Pröbsting’s article serves confusion. It arms the reader with suspicion toward actually existing socialist and anti-hegemonic forces while leaving the main imperialist structure conceptually intact. It belongs firmly to the compatible left. Its radicalism is hollow. And beneath the footnotes and Lenin quotations, it is not serious Marxism but pure anti-communism.

My polish nationalist friend we meet again.

Pröbsting and Spectre belong to what should be called the Western-compatible left: third-camp, Trotskyite, anti-AES, anti-communist “Marxism” that dresses itself in revolutionary vocabulary while arriving, again and again, at conclusions useful to the imperialist centre. Their role is ideological: to discipline the left away from actual anti-imperialist politics and back into a sterile moral equivalence where the China, Russia, Cuba, Vietnam, and every state that breaks from imperial obedience is reduced to “authoritarian capitalism” or “campism.” Pröbsting is a charlatan in this precise sense: he uses Marxist language to empty Marxism of its concrete historical content.

The first deception is the framing. “One Should Not Camouflage Capitalist and Imperialist China as Socialist.” This is not an investigation. It is a verdict written before the trial. China is declared capitalist and imperialist in advance, and then every fact is forced into that frame. Private capital exists? Therefore capitalism. Chinese firms operate abroad? Therefore imperialism. China has inequality? Therefore socialism is fake. This is not dialectics. It is checklist formalism. It takes surface phenomena, tears them out of historical motion, and calls the result Marxism.

Pröbsting’s argument depends on confusing the existence of capitalist forms with the rule of the capitalist class. Marxism has never meant that socialist transition abolishes every market relation overnight. Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Deng, and every serious revolutionary tradition understood that socialism emerges out of inherited conditions, not fantasy blueprints. The real question is not whether commodity production, private firms, wages, inequality, or markets exist. The real question is: which class holds state power, which forces command the commanding heights, what is the direction of development, and whether the economy is subordinated to imperial finance capital or to a sovereign socialist project.

On this decisive question, Pröbsting evades. He treats China’s socialist market economy as if it were simply neoliberal capitalism with red flags. But China’s system is not governed by Wall Street, the IMF, NATO, the World Bank, or a comprador bourgeoisie. Land remains publicly owned. The banks remain owned by the state. Strategic sectors remain under state control. Capital is allowed to develop in secondary sectors, but it is also disciplined, subordinated, purged, broken up, redirected, and politically contained when it threatens the broader line. Chinese billionaires do not command the Party; they fear it. That fact alone makes nonsense of the claim that China is just another capitalist dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

His misuse of Lenin is even worse. Lenin’s theory of imperialism is not “large economy plus foreign investment equals imperialism.” Lenin analyzed a world system dominated by monopoly finance capital, colonial division, superexploitation, and the domination of oppressed nations by a handful of advanced capitalist powers. Imperialism is not a moral insult. It is a concrete relation of domination. To call China imperialist in the same sense as the United States, Britain, France, Germany, or Japan is to erase the entire colonial and semi-colonial structure of the modern world.

China did not build its rise through the Atlantic slave trade, colonial genocide, the partition of Africa, the looting of India, unequal treaties, NATO bombing campaigns, CIA coups, IMF structural adjustment, or dollar hegemony. China itself was a victim of imperialism: carved up, humiliated, invaded, semi-colonized, and devastated. Its revolution was a national liberation revolution and a socialist revolution. To pretend that China’s development today is equivalent to the imperialist rise of Britain or the United States is pure historical illiteracy.

Pröbsting also twists the meaning of capital export. Lenin identified capital export as one feature of imperialism, but not in isolation. Capital export becomes imperialist when tied to monopoly finance domination, political subjugation, military coercion, and the extraction of superprofits from dependent nations. Chinese loans, infrastructure projects, trade relationships, and investments may contain contradictions. But they are categorically not IMF debt traps or in any meaningful way similar to French control over African currencies, US sanctions regimes, NATO military occupation, or British colonial extraction. To flatten these differences is to assist imperialism ideologically.

His treatment of multipolarity is equally dishonest. Pröbsting calls it “multi-imperialism,” as though the weakening of US hegemony has no progressive content for oppressed nations. This is abstract moralism. Multipolarity is not socialism. BRICS is not the Comintern. Trade between sovereign states is not proletarian internationalism. But the collapse of unipolar US domination creates space for national development, resistance to sanctions, alternative financing, technological sovereignty, and political breathing room for the Global South. Only a Western leftist insulated by imperial privilege can look at the weakening of US hegemony and sneer that it makes no difference.

This is where the “compatible left” truly reveals itself. Claiming to oppose all imperialisms equally, but in practice spending its energy attacking the enemies of the main imperialist bloc. Its function is to tell workers and oppressed peoples that there is no meaningful difference between the boot on their neck and the hand helping them stand up.

The article’s treatment of China’s private sector is another example of vulgar formalism. Yes, China has private firms. Yes, China has billionaires. Yes, market reforms produced contradictions, inequality, corruption, speculation, and ideological danger. But Pröbsting cannot explain why, if the bourgeoisie rules China, the Chinese state repeatedly disciplines capital in ways no bourgeois state in the imperialist core would tolerate. Why were tech monopolies checked? Why was private tutoring smashed? Why are capitalists compelled to align with national planning? Why are Party cells embedded in firms? Why was the housing bubble purposefully deflated? Why does the state retain decisive control over finance, land, energy, infrastructure, heavy industry, transport, telecommunications, and strategic planning? In a bourgeois dictatorship, capital disciplines the state. In China, the state disciplines capital.

The existence of billionaires proves contradiction. It does not prove capitalist class rule. A Marxist must examine contradiction concretely. A charlatan waves at a rich man and declares the revolution dead.

Pröbsting’s argument also misunderstands socialist transition. China does not claim to have achieved communism, nor even a fully developed socialism free of class struggle. It describes itself as being in the primary stage of socialism. That reflects the material problem of building socialism in a huge formerly oppressed country, with uneven development, rural poverty, technological dependence, hostile encirclement, and the legacy of semi-colonial underdevelopment. The task is not to perform purity for Western Trotskyites but to survive, develop the productive forces, maintain Party rule, avoid Soviet collapse, defeat absolute poverty, and build the material basis for further socialist advance.

This is what the compatible left cannot forgive. China did not collapse. China did not submit. China did not become another comprador state. China did not allow shock therapy to loot its people the way Russia did in the 1990s. China used markets without surrendering state power to the market. It absorbed foreign capital without becoming politically colonized by foreign capital. It entered the world market without accepting permanent dependency. That is why imperialism hates China. And that is why the Western anti-AES left must invent theories proving that China is secretly the same as its enemies.

Pröbsting’s discussion of inequality is also opportunistic. Inequality is real. But he uses it one-sidedly. He does not seriously weigh the historic eradication of extreme poverty, the transformation of rural infrastructure, mass literacy, public health gains, industrial upgrading, housing expansion, transport development, food security, or the sheer scale of human development achieved under CPC leadership. For him, inequality proves capitalism, while poverty reduction proves nothing.

His approach to the state is particularly anti-Marxist. Marxism does not analyze the state by reading stock market data alone. The state is an instrument of class power. If China is capitalist, Pröbsting must explain the class character of the CPC, the PLA, state ownership, planning institutions, cadre discipline, capital controls, land relations, and the recurring campaigns against corruption, monopoly, separatism, financial disorder, and ideological liberalization. He does not do this adequately because his conclusion requires skipping the hard question: why does China behave unlike a normal bourgeois state?

Given Canada’s history this isn’t particularly far off no? Indigenous genocide, only allowing Ukrainian refugees in ww2 with ss tattoos and other stuff? Or is that all not true?

What good are sanctions from a country across a distant ocean

I don’t know probably the 800 global military bases around the world, multiple client states and a sanction regime pushed through the UN amounting to an effective medieval style siege of the country.

global hegemon.

I don’t think you know what this means.

I’m sure those NK Migs took only photos and left only memories on their flyovers during the war. Definitely no bombs

Definitely equivalent to the global military superpower waging a campaign of extermination that destroyed all of the farmland, and structures killing between 1 in 5 and 1 in 4 of the population and leaving the rest living in caves. You are very smart.

OUN (The banderites)

Cope harder shitlib you know it’s true. Shitlibs in cosplay like you give actual anarchists a bad name.

my valuable time

😂 Just say you’re running away because you don’t have the theoretical capacity to continue. It’s ok you don’t have to pretend.

Have fun with your easily sabotaged worker’s party, waiting for true communism as introducted by China. /s

Life for us proletariat in China is improving year on year as the economy is further socialised and the birdcage tightened. China is the current furthest along the socialist transition, is this an eternal truth obviously not but currently it absolutely is true. Also this coming from an anarchist is truly comedy when have you(plural) achieved anything. In fact if you were to quantify historical anarchist achievements it would likely be negative

TIL ancient rome was not doing imperialism. /s

The fact you seemingly lack the capability to separate pre capitalist imperialism and imperialism in the modern age and think thats and own is comical.

Why bring him up, then?

Because you cited his definitions and grounded the discussion in his work. I gave a brief assessment of the theorist whose categories you were using, then moved directly into the categories themselves. You clearly have some attachment to Anark and need him to be treated as a serious thinker. That’s fine you can keep that belief. The rest of us can look at the phrase-mongering, the weak grasp of Marxism, and the anti-communism and move on.

Leninism is not a correct logical development of Marxism. His theory of the bourgeois state as an agent of the bourgeoisie is blatantly incorrect.

Completely detached from reality and history.

The idea that the bourgeois state is not an agent of the bourgeoisie is absurd. What do you think the bourgeois state does? It protects private property, enforces contract law, disciplines labour, defends capital accumulation, preserves the conditions for wage labour, protects imperialist extraction, bails out capital in crisis, breaks strikes when necessary, polices the dispossessed, and maintains the legal and military framework of bourgeois rule. This is not mystical. It is the observable function of the modern capitalist state.

Lenin did not drag Marxism away from Marx. He developed Marxism under the conditions of monopoly capitalism, imperialism, world war, proletarian revolution, and colonial struggle. You can reject Leninism, but pretending it is not a logical development of Marxism in the age of imperialism is just unserious.

Your Lenin quotes, where he dismisses anarchist collectivism, are another example of how he had some serious bullshit takes.

“Correctly classifying this as slander is a protection against Brandolini’s law.” /s

You were very concerned about “slander” when Anark was called a phrase-monger with a poor understanding of Marxism, but apparently Lenin can simply be dismissed as having “bullshit takes.” Convenient standard. In any case, Lenin was not unaware that collectivist anarchists existed. His point was that anarchism, even in collectivist dress, tends toward petty-bourgeois individualism because it rejects proletarian state power, centralism, discipline, and the political struggle necessary for the working class to rule as a class.

Name one animal where a hierarchy exists that starves other members of their species from the things they require to live. Name one animal where the hierarchies persist in a form after the individual at the top dies. Name one animal where the upper rungs of the hierarchies can punish the lower ones.

Humans, for all three, since the beginning of organized human society: family heads becoming clan elders to chiefs and so on.

But even outside humans, your framing is weak. Elephant seals maintain dominance hierarchies where dominant males monopolize access to mates and violently exclude rivals. Spotted hyenas have durable matriarchal hierarchies where rank affects access to food and social power. Bees and naked mole rats have reproductive hierarchies where queens monopolize reproduction and subordinate members are biologically and socially organized into specialized roles. Many primates punish lower-ranking members through aggression, exclusion, and dominance enforcement.

Does this mean capitalism is natural? No. That would be a stupid conclusion. But it shows why your biology argument is useless pseudoscience. Biology does not prove anarchism. It does not prove anti-hierarchy. It does not tell us which forms of authority are socially necessary, exploitative, transitional, oppressive, or liberatory. For that, you need historical and class analysis.

You don’t understand the anarchist definition of hierarchy.

I understand it. I think it is bad.

The anarchist definition of hierarchy 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.

That is exactly the problem. The category is moral and elastic, not materialist. It expands to condemn socialist states and contracts to excuse socially necessary authority. Marxists are more direct: the question is not whether authority exists, but which class exercises it, through what institutions, over what property relations, and toward what historical end.

Explain how workers defending against counter-revolution is authoritarian, according to the above definition.

It is authoritarian by that definition because the proletariat monopolizes control over the social implementation of power by excluding the bourgeoisie, landlords, fascists, imperial agents, and other reactionary currents from political power. That is the dictatorship of the proletariat. That is the point.

This is why the definition is useless for Marxist analysis. It cannot distinguish between the bourgeoisie monopolizing power to preserve exploitation and the proletariat monopolizing power to suppress exploiters. Which I hope you can realise are two entirely separate concepts who’s conflation only serves the status quo.

You continuously conflate the party with the workers.

No, I identify the vanguard party as the organized political arm of the working class, not as a mystical substitute for every individual worker’s immediate opinion at every moment. The proletariat is not automatically unified, politically clear, or immune to bourgeois ideology simply because it is exploited. Workers can hold reactionary, liberal, nationalist, religious, racist, patriarchal, or even fascist ideas. That is why organization, theory, discipline, and leadership is necessary.

Your alternative is idealist fantasy: decentralized soviets magically expressing the authentic will of the workers without bourgeois pressure, imperialist sabotage, uneven consciousness, localism, corruption, military threat, economic backwardness, or class enemies. In reality, proletarian power requires institutions capable of coordinating production, defending the revolution, suppressing counter-revolution, and raising the political level of the masses. That is what the party is for.

This is not the same as conflating Ukrainians with their bourgeois-nationalist and fascist-influenced government. A bourgeois state rules over the masses in the interests of capital. A proletarian party, at least in its revolutionary function, is the organized instrument through which the working class consolidates power against capital. You can claim a given party has degenerated or failed; that is a concrete historical argument. But simply saying “party not identical to workers” is meaningless drivel.

No, in socialism, every worker should have a say in how the surplus value is employed, in addition with the consumers, ideally in decentralized soviets.

The petty bourgeois individualism continues…

Yes, workers should participate in the state, in planning, in mass organizations, in workplace organs, in party structures, in unions, in local governance, and in criticism and supervision of officials. But “having a say” does not mean each individual worker, workplace, or local soviet has complete control over surplus. The means of production are not owned by isolated individuals or atomized local bodies. They are owned by the proletariat as a class.

That means surplus is not distributed according to each worker’s immediate individual preference. It is socially directed toward the needs of the whole class and the development of socialist society: infrastructure, education, healthcare, housing, defense, industrialization, science, poverty alleviation, regional development, and expanded reproduction. This requires central planning, coordination, administration, and coercive protection against restorationist forces.

You deny the petty-bourgeois individualist critique of anarchism, then immediately judge socialism from the standpoint of dispersed local control and suspicion of class-wide centralized power. That is again precisely the petty-bourgeois horizon: hostile to capital, but unable to grasp the proletariat ruling as a class through socialized property, state power, central planning, and revolutionary discipline.

Definitions aren’t used to explain things on their own. They need to be combined with reasoning to explain anything. What’s your definition? Do you have a better one? Ideally one, without any moral judgement baked in.

I didn’t say definitions explain things on their own, though obviously definitions matter for explanation. Analytical labels however are supposed to have explanatory power. That is the entire point of terms like capitalism, socialism, feudalism, fascism, or imperialism. To redefine them in a way as to vacate them of that power is idiotic.

If your definition of imperialism is broad enough to include any external state activity (aid, trade, diplomacy, war, military support, medical missions, infrastructure projects, and so on) then it explains nothing. It just becomes “when a country does something internationally.” That as I already pointed out vacates the term of any meaningful analytical use.

The better definition is the Hobson/Lenin definition: imperialism is a stage of capitalism, specifically monopoly capitalism. It emerges when capital is highly concentrated, finance capital dominates, the export of capital becomes central, and great powers divide the world into spheres of influence in pursuit of markets, resources, cheap labour, and superprofits, subjugating weaker countries militarily, financially, and diplomatically to secure those interests.

That does not bake in moral judgement. It is not “imperialism is when bad countries do bad things.” It is a specific account of advanced capitalism and what it necessitates.

Again with the motivated reasoning. Also, the class structure can be deduced from the definition without explicitly stating it.

No, not “motivated reasoning.” but basic analysis.

The distinction between capitalism and socialism is class power. The distinction between capitalism and feudalism is also class power. Capitalism means bourgeois rule and wage labour. Feudalism means aristocratic/landlord rule and feudal obligation. Socialism means working-class rule and production subordinated to social need rather than private accumulation.

So a definition of capitalism, socialism, feudalism, or “state capitalism” that does not mention class rule is meaningless beyond slogan.

Your definition was:

State-Capitalism: The mode of production where the means of production are owned by the institutions of the state.

The class content absolutely cannot be deduced from that. It is so wide it could apply to a workers’ state, a capitalist state, or even a feudal state with major state-owned productive assets. These are completely different social formations with complete different classes ruling.

Now you conflate imperialism with something that needs victims. My definition doesn’t require any definition of victims. You can disagree, but you’d need to supply a definition that is better suited to describe the world.

The problem is not that imperialism needs “victims” as a definitional checkbox. The problem is that imperialism, historically and structurally, entails domination, extraction, subordination, and violence. That is not moralism. That is what imperialism materially is under capitalism.

Your redefinition strips that out and reduces imperialism to generic international activity. Frankly, redefining imperialism in a way that erases the brutality it actually entails should be treated with the same contempt as holocaust denial. Collapsing Cuba sending doctors abroad into the same category as European colonial slaughter in Africa, US-backed coups, sanctions, debt domination, neocolonial extraction, and military occupation.

Insulting me doesn’t make your arguments any more coherent.

Not an insult, an observation.

Imperialism: The practice of states to expand their influence beyond their sovereign borders.

Vacous redefinition of the term that vacates it of all it’s explanatory power.

State-Capitalism: The mode of production where the means of production are owned by the institutions of the state.

A definition of capitalism that includes no mention of class or class power is meaningless.

So, now you want a moralist argument? O.o

Not moralist to ask for proof of the imperialist power doing imperialism. Nice attempt at a dodge though.

You genuinely become more of a parody of the western “anarchist” with every post.

You attacked the person instead of the argument by stating wrong things about him, aka slander.

No, I did not. I gave my assessment of Anark’s theoretical positions and then addressed the argument directly. Saying someone is a phrase-monger with a poor understanding of Marxism is not slander when it’s true. If someone’s categories erase class content, state form, property relations, imperialism, and the dictatorship of the proletariat, then their understanding of Marxism is directly relevant to the discussion. Calling that “slander” is just a way to avoid answering the critique.

Also, what Marx said and what Lenin said are two distinct things. You shouldn’t throw them together.

Marx and Lenin are obviously different people writing in different periods. But their analysis is not sealed off into unrelated compartments. Lenin develops Marxism under the conditions of imperialism and proletarian revolution; he does not abandon Marx. On anarchism, their criticisms are fundamentally linked and lead to the same core conclusion: anarchism expresses a petty-bourgeois individualist hostility to the political struggle, proletarian state power, and the transitional dictatorship of the proletariat.

As Lenin put it:

“Anarchism is bourgeois individualism in reverse. Individualism as the basis of the entire anarchist world outlook.”

Or:

“The philosophy of the anarchists is bourgeois philosophy turned inside out. Their individualistic theories and their individualistic ideal are the very opposite of socialism.”

The rejection of being dominated is rooted in biology.

This is pseudoscientific hand-waving at best. Humans and animals have formed hierarchies since the dawn of cooperation. Parent and child, teacher and student, doctor and patient, experienced worker and apprentice, commander and militia member: hierarchy and authority emerge for concrete reasons, and they sure as shit are not simply “rejected by biology.” The serious question is not whether authority exists. It is what kind of authority, rooted in what social relation, serving what purpose, and accountable to whom. A parent stopping a child from running into traffic is not the same thing as a landlord extracting rent, and neither is the same thing as a workers’ state suppressing counter-revolution.

So, do the workers of state-owned means of production keep all the value they create, or is the surplus value taken by its owner, the party?

I am genuinely speechless that you spent so much time braying about anarchism not being petty-bourgeois or individualist, only to end with an almost parody-level petty-bourgeois individualist misunderstanding of socialism.

Socialism does not mean every individual worker directly owns “their” means of production and receives “their” full individual value like a little proprietor. That is petty bourgeois nonsense. Socialism means the proletariat as a class owns the means of production through socialized forms and redirects surplus toward the needs of the proletariat as a whole, instead of having that surplus privately appropriated by capitalists.

Your formulation exposes exactly the individualist petty-bourgeois premise you just spent paragraphs denying. You treat socialism as if it should mean each worker or each workplace immediately pockets its own product. That is a fantasy of decentralized proprietorship, not proletarian social ownership. The proletariat does not abolish capitalism by turning every worker into a tiny owner guarding their own little share. It abolishes capitalism by taking hold of production as a class and subordinating surplus to collective development.

Again it is remarkable how perfectly your ending demonstrates the critique. You deny that anarchism is petty-bourgeois individualism, then immediately judge socialist ownership from the standpoint of the isolated producer asking, “Where is my individual product?” That is the petty-bourgeois horizon in its purest form: hostile to the capitalist, but incapable of grasping the proletariat acting as a class through socialized property, central planning, and state power.

China: Capitalist, imperialist

Could you list the victims of Chinese imperialism? Please also define imperialism and capitalism.

My claim is Venezuela is a dictatorship

Have any proof for that claim? Or honestly even a proper analysis of the Venezuelan system and in what ways you believe it doesn’t serve the people/the people aren’t in control?

Saying Anark displays a poor understanding of Marxism is not an ad hominem. It is an observation about the content of his analysis. An ad hominem would be “he is wrong because he is personally bad or stupid.” I am saying his categories are weak because they fail to grasp class content, state form, property relations, and historical development. That is directly relevant to the argument.

I also never said individualism is the only or the main pillar of anarchism. I said it is a pillar, which it plainly is, and this has been a Marxist criticism of anarchism since Marx and Lenin. The fact that there is a collectivist anarchist tradition does not erase the petty-bourgeois individualist core of much anarchist theory: the tendency to begin from abstract individual autonomy, abstract anti-authority, and abstract moral opposition to coercion rather than from class struggle and historically specific relations of production.

Your defense of the “authoritarianism” definition as merely “abstract” misses the point. The problem is not abstraction as such. Marxism uses abstraction constantly. The problem is bad abstraction: abstraction that removes the decisive features of the thing being analyzed. A useful abstraction helps reveal the essence of a process. This one obscures it. It tells us there is concentrated power, coercion, and administration. That describes every state and every serious revolutionary process in class society. What it does not tell us is which class holds power, what property relations are being defended or abolished, what state form exists, what social base sustains it, what historical pressures condition it, and whether the coercion is being used to preserve exploitation or suppress exploiters.

My objection is not that the definition is “too abstract.” It is that it is vacuous. It explains nothing of substance while pretending to explain everything. It takes the unavoidable existence of state power under class antagonism and gives it a scary liberal gloss. Then, in practice, it becomes a ready-made tool for flattening the difference between a bourgeois imperialist state and a socialist state under siege. You can say the critique is “against all states,” but that is infantile. Critiquing all states in the same moral register, without class content, only benefits the existing hegemonic order. The bourgeois state already exists globally as the dominant power. Treating proletarian state power as equally evil for exercising coercion does not transcend the bourgeois state; it disarms opposition to it.

You also accuse me of hiding behind the abstraction of “class interest,” but class interest is not an empty abstraction. It is rooted in material relations to production, ownership, surplus extraction, and the reproduction of social relations. The bourgeoisie has an interest in maintaining private ownership of the means of production and the extraction of surplus value. The proletariat has an interest in abolishing those relations because it does not own the means of production and survives by selling labour-power. That is not idealism. That is basic historical materialism.

Your claim that party members or state administrators in socialist states are automatically not proletarian because they administer is nonsense. Class is not determined by whether someone performs administrative labour or exercises authority. Class position is determined principally by relation to the means of production, particularly ownership thereof. A school principal is not less proletarian than a teacher merely because they administer. A doctor, safety inspector, engineer, planner, or workplace coordinator may exercise authority in a technical or administrative capacity without thereby becoming a capitalist. The key question is whether they privately own productive property and appropriate surplus value as capital.

The same applies to government administrators in socialist states. Their existence creates contradictions, and bureaucracy can become a serious danger. Marxist-Leninists have written extensively on this. But a state functionary operating inside a socialized property system, without private ownership of the means of production, without the legal right to buy, sell, bequeath, and accumulate productive property as capital, is not automatically a bourgeois class simply because they administer. You are confusing function with class position.

Saying “they administer via authoritarian and domination strategies” does not solve this. It just repeats the same empty categories. Every state administers through coercive mechanisms because every state is an instrument of class rule. The question is not whether coercion exists. The question is coercion by which class, against which class, defending which property relations, and moving society in which direction. Without that, “authoritarianism” and “domination” become little more than moral labels for power you dislike.

I do not think “authoritarian” is inherently a Western propaganda term. The problem is that it is a vacuous political label: it covers a wide range of state forms and social relations while explaining very little about their actual class content. In that sense, it functions much like “regime.” It can describe almost anything with centralized power, but it tells us nothing decisive about which class rules, what property relations are being defended, whose interests the state serves, or what historical conditions produced it. Precisely because of that vagueness which abstracts away the core of the matter, it becomes useful to Western propaganda under the current conditions of Western hegemony: it allows imperialist states and their ideological apparatuses to flatten socialist, anti-imperialist, or otherwise non-aligned states into a moral category of “bad governments,” they can then point to and shout look at these authoritarians who are just as authoritarian (read bad) as the Nazis.

Edit: Damn I appear to have joined cowbee on the prestigious “anarchist” block list. (An important note that “anarchists” and anarchists are distinct groups).

I am not going to pretend to be an expert on Anark’s whole body of work. I have only watched a handful of his videos, on recommendation from an anarchist I know. But what I did see was enough to recognize: petty-bourgeois anarchism dressed up in the language and strappings of rigorous theory. The starting point it appears is never class struggle, production, imperialism, state power, colonial pressure, or the actual historical tasks of socialist construction. It is abstract “power,” abstract “authority,” abstract “domination,” and then a moral judgment against every real revolutionary state for failing to match an idealized fantasy of immediate anti-authoritarian purity.

In theoretical terms: phrase-mongering and infantile ultra-leftism. From what I have seen, his understanding of Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, and existing socialist states is paper-thin. Socialist construction under siege, blockade, sabotage, civil war, peasant backwardness, imperialist encirclement, and restorationist pressure gets flattened into a morality tale about “authoritarianism.”

His definition of power is fine, if overly individualist: “the ability to successfully enact one’s will.” This makes sense given individualism being a pillar of anarchism. But the definition of “authoritarianism” is yet another vacuous redefinition to add to the pile. It strips analysis of class content, state form, property relations, and historical function. “The degree to which a power structure monopolizes control over the total social implementation of some power” sounds precise, but it tells us almost nothing. Which class controls it? Through what institutions? On the basis of what property relations? Against whom is coercion being used? In what historical situation? A workers’ state, a fascist state, a colonial state, a bourgeois liberal state, and a revolutionary army can all be made to fit vague language about monopoly, coercion, and implementation. Returning it once again to a label for designated bad countries™.

Your claim that defending proletarian power is “not materialist” because it supposedly relies on people with the correct ideas doing domination is a misunderstanding of the argument. Marxist-Leninists do not defend proletarian state power because the people wielding it have nicer opinions. We defend it because class power is materially rooted. A bourgeois state defends private property, capital accumulation, wage labour, imperialist extraction, and the dictatorship of capital not because they have bad ideas but that it is directly within their class interest to do so. A proletarian state, however imperfectly and under real contradiction, is a transitional instrument for suppressing the old exploiting classes, socializing production, defending the revolution, and reorganizing society toward communism not because they have better ideas but again because it is directly in their class interest to do so.

You also misunderstand class when you claim that administrators in socialist states simply become a ruling class of bureaucrats because they administer. Administrators, planners, party officials, and state functionaries can absolutely develop bureaucratic distortions, careerism, privilege, and contradictions. Marxist-Leninists do not need anarchists to discover bureaucracy for us. But a bureaucrat without private ownership of the means of production, without the legal right to buy, sell, bequeath, and accumulate productive property as capital, does not occupy a different class but a different stratum of the same class.

And it is obviously valid to point out that words were specifically chosen for their negative connotations. An unrelated example to show the point: there’s a reason western media uses regime for talking about “designated bad countries™” governments despite it effectively being a synonym of government, it’s the connotation. Criticising this is again obviously valid.

Present Russia is not socialist or communist so I don’t see how this is relevant?

No but the assumption that because I’m Chinese I must be a troll and the “say something bad about mao” absolutely are racist you disgusting crakkker. Go die.