Voting for a genocide backing fascist because they are more personable than the cruel mean fascist rather than doing anything constructive makes you a fascist. The real leftist option is not voting for fascists and then yes ideally overthrowing the capitalist system(sort of a core part of being a leftist).

Looks pretty accurate for those of us outside the imperial core.

I guess the saying holds.

If you can remember what happened over a week ago that makes you a tankie

You’re not “keeping it intact to prevent harm.” You’re keeping it intact because you benefit from it.

The US led system isn’t something you stabilize and then dismantle later. It only exists through massive violence. Every extra year you preserve it is more sanctions, more bombs, more dead people.

And “after Trump” is always the line. It was “after Reagan”, “after Bush,” then “after Trump,” then it will be “after the next Republican.” There is always a new emergency to justify doing nothing to even attempt to slow the immisiration machine.

Nobody else can fix your chauvinism for you. That takes introspection. You need to start considering the rest of us as fully human whose suffering is not secondary to your comfort.

The facts are: Both parties support the imperialist empire. Both fund genocide, sanctions, coups, and proxy wars. Both uphold capitalism and the systematically broken policing system. Both expand surveillance and repression. “Voting blue” has never stopped any of this, it just puts a nicer face on it, the equivalent of sticking a smiling face sticker on the orphan crushing machine.

If you actually want to do something: Stop treating Democrats as harm reduction. Consider third-party or abstention instead of laundering war crimes with your vote. Join a communist organization. Study theory. Do material work in your community. Organize. Build power locally. Arm yourself. Do literally anything other than vote for a war criminal every 2-4 years.

If you want to vote, vote just stop trying to justify yourself as super moral for voting for the personable war criminal over the more openly cruel one.

You’re being chauvinist. You may not want to admit it, but it’s the only way this position makes sense.

Your “lesser evil” logic only works if you implicitly treat people in the imperial periphery as expendable, as if our suffering matters less than your domestic anxieties. Your entire framework centers US comfort while mass death abroad becomes background noise.

Who backed the genocide in Gaza? Who destroyed Libya and turned it into a failed state with open slave markets? Who armed proxies that helped give rise to ISIS in Syria? Who backed decades of rape and mass killing in Afghanistan?

It was bipartisan. Every time. Enthusiastically bipartisan.

Permanent war, sanctions, coups, and the immiseration of the Global South are the foundation of the system. Democrats and Republicans agree on this completely.

So when you say “one leads to fascism and the other leads back to the status quo,” you leave out the key point: the status quo already depends on mass death elsewhere. Your stability is subsidized by bombs, blockades, and starvation.

Yes, Republicans are more “meaner” at home. Democrats use nicer language. That’s PR. Democrats provide legitimacy for the same imperial machine while managing the decline more “politely”.

From Palestine to Haiti, there is no meaningful lesser evil just continuous catastrophe.

Your argument boils down to: as long as things don’t get too bad too fast here, everything else is negotiable.

That’s peak chauvinism.

Well you’d be SEEING less thanks to the likelihood of copmala having way better pr but in reality us of the periphery and USian minorities would still be subject to much the same just with a better spin for the Euro-Americans.

Remember Obama destroyed Libya. The Clinton’s bombed Yugoslavia and Iraq as well as the entire Somali debacle.

In reality if you see non white suffering as counting odds are the net would be within the error bars if you graphed it.

Look I understand a lot of where you’re coming from given your background, however:

Basically everything you “know” about politics and political economy is seemingly somewhere between wildly exaggerated and outright fairytale, and you don’t yet grasp the scale or sophistication of the narrative control you’re actually living under.

You say you prefer to know you’re being lied to, but in the West you usually don’t. That’s the point. Through ownership, framing, omission, and repetition, discourse is managed in the boardroom long before anything reaches you. I already linked you Inventing Reality by Michael Parenti for a reason: every story shown or not shown, every angle chosen, exists to shape what feels “normal” or “thinkable.” That ideological hegemony is deeper and more effective than the cartoon version of censorship projected onto China and socialist states in general.

Your second paragraph still rests on the same misunderstanding, communism isn’t about silencing people to “keep the peace,” it’s about suppressing reactionary and bourgeois forces so they can’t sabotage collective development as they have repeatedly proven themselves to do historically as their class interest is diametrically opposed to the interests of the masses.

Finally, this rise of conservatism(fascism) you’re talking about isn’t some temporary cultural mood swing, it’s capitalism in decay. When imperialism can’t externalize crisis anymore, its violence turns inward. That’s why you’re feeling it now. The teeth of empire always come home eventually. If you’re serious about understanding any of this, you need to move past liberal intuitions and actually study political economy. Hope without analysis just leaves you disarmed. You really should read the books/articles I linked in the last reply.

I was right you’re one of those. Best of luck to you in life I hope you don’t regret it when you get what you want.

This has to be trolling right? There’s no way you misunderstand the issue “tankies” have with electoralism this badly unless you’re doing it purposefully.

Why waste time canvassing and voting and taking part in the system that is from its inception designed to keep you down? Take that time and effort and put it into something meaningful like organising a militant party of those with theoretical grounding to build up a counter power structure and make real change.

“I don’t pretend to know everything about leftist theory,”

This goes so far beyond that. You don’t even know the basics. What you’re doing is building a house of cards out of vibes on top of an ingrained liberal foundation. There’s no material or really any serious analysis across any of your comments, just assumptions about “power,” “freedom,” and “human nature” that you’ve inherited from Western ideology and never seriously interrogated. You think it’s simple because you’ve taken a vibes first approach to it as opposed to doing any study which might challenge your comfort.

If you’re British, German, American it doesn’t matter you are situated in the imperial core reaping the rewards of imperialism. You received concessions from the bourgeoisie to keep you from seriously challenging the largest most advanced immiseration machine in human history. Hence I used the term Euro-American. I could also just say white/western “leftist” or shitlib or radlib or whatever other word for privileged member of the imperial core it doesn’t really change much . Your class interest is aligned with the imperialist empire and in direct opposition to the oppressed of the world. You should read Settlers and Imperialism the highest stage of capitalism

Then you try to lecture me(someone actually from and living in China) about how corruption is handled here, and you’re simply wrong. Anti-corruption trials are public. Everyone knows about them. Officials, executives, generals(people right up to the very top) are investigated, removed, and jailed under the Communist Party of China. In the West, corruption is largely legalized through lobbying, revolving doors, and finance. And even when the line is crossed, it’s usually overlooked as long as it doesn’t threaten the moneyed class.

You also claim things “generally improve in the long term” in the West. Improve for whom? Whatever social-democratic gains Europe and the US had were built on and sustained by imperialism and neocolonial extraction. Euro-American countries raped and looted the periphery for centuries to fund the “treats” you now point to as progress at home. Meanwhile, without plundering the Global South, China alone lifted nearly a billion people out of poverty through planned socialist development. While your comfort was subsidized by other people’s misery.

Your fixation on “individual freedoms” just confirms to me your liberal foundation that you refuse to reckon with. You’re poisoned by hyper-individualism. You talk about freedom as personal expression divorced from class power, ownership, housing, healthcare, or production. That’s just consumer ideology. You don’t seem to understand that collective material conditions matter more than abstract personal liberty. Reactionaries and bourgeoisie current should be repressed, they should not have the freedom to exploit others.

And on “free speech”: you seriously overestimate how free it is in the West. Read Inventing Reality by Michael Parenti. He explains in a way that should be easy for you as a beginner to understand how media ownership and elite filtering manufacture topics and angles long before anything reaches public debate. Look at what’s happening right now: protesters arrested and brutalised en masse across Europe and the US, specific to your location Palestine Action being designated a terrorist organization in the UK, and in Germany open criticism of Israel being criminalized. So spare me the fairy tale about open discourse. You’re allowed to talk, as long as it doesn’t threaten capital or the empire but don’t forget who’s holding the reigns it’s not the people.

Finally, coming back to your “no hierarchy + automation + abolish money soon” vision, it avoids every serious question: how do you suppress bourgeois forces, organize production, defend society, and prevent capital from reasserting itself? You don’t answer any of that. You just gesture toward a futuristic fantasy. Marxists have already long addressed this: money and the state only wither away after global class abolition. Pretending we can skip the transition period is utopian fantasy. Try read Socialism: Utopian and Scientific and Critique of the Gotha Programme

If that was true I feel you’d have a less warped view. But it is the internet and you are clearly driven by some vendetta.

Policy and ideology is generally more of an in person topic but there is still plenty of it online just not on platforms like 小红书 because they are specifically lifestyle or whatever else focusednand generally moderated to keep it that way, and even they have plenty of politics if you search the proper keywords.

You also clearly don’t know what socialism is which almost any Chinese person could explain even if not in great detail from school. Socialism is the transitionary period between capitalism and communism. It retains a lot of the contradictions of capitalism as they are worked through and overcome. This leads to people still working for a wage but with certain guarantees from the government as they ensure capital works for the public good as it is reigned in and collectivised over time.

All you’ve done is show you don’t really know anything about what you’re arrogantly preaching.

Come to China I can give you a tour you can talk to the actual people on the ground. You have less than 0 understanding of what you’re talking about.

Wow bot jacketing me instead of actually contending with anything I have to say. unfortunately not the first time.

Corruption is not caused by “power” in the abstract. It’s produced by class relations and ownership of production. Every class society has authority, the issue is which class controls it. That is until class society is abolished on a global scale, but that’s so far in the future acting like it’s the next step is infantile and ridiculous.

Saying “no system handles corruption better than another” is just blatantly false. Under the Communist Party of China, billionaires and senior officials are regularly investigated, removed, and jailed. In capitalist states, corruption is legalized and encouraged pointing this out isn’t exceptionalism I’m not sure you know what that word means. Is it exceptionalism to say that liberal democracy handles representation of the people better than feudalism? Obviously not that’s ridiculous.

I’ll give the same example again as you skipped over it to bot jacket me. Jack Ma was disciplined for pushing US-style financialization. In the United States, that same behavior is rewarded and institutionalized.

“Get rid of money” without explaining how you suppress bourgeois forces, organize production, and defend society during transition is not a program, it’s a slogan. Repeating this again from earlier: money like the state only withers away after classes are abolished far in the future.

Corruption is a known contradiction of the socialist transition period. It does not delegitimize the socialist project it simply proves continuous class struggle and anti-corruption campaigns are necessary hence their implementation in socialist states under communist parties.

Where you complain about “hierarchy” you’re just doing vague “human-nature” metaphysics. This is idealism and is about as reliable as scripture for analysis.

Look I don’t want to be mean (even if I find you to be unduly arrogant and condescending and I really don’t appreciate the bot jacketing), however these comments reek of Euro-American left liberalism. All vibes no dialectical or historical materialism or really any serious analysis at all.

You effectively do the “human nature” bit which is idealist metaphysics bullshit and you really seem to lack any understanding of any leftist theory.

You really should consider studying scientific socialism and deconstructing your liberal foundations. Vibes are not analysis and that’s all you have for now. If you want I can recommend you some books/articles that can help you but I have a feeling you disagree with my framing of you.

This line of thinking is idealist and deeply unserious “baby leftism”.

“Just remove leadership” and “get rid of money” is not a political program. It’s a slogan. Every class society has leadership and structures of power. The real question is which class controls them, and through what institutions.

Leadership is not automatically a separate class. Under socialism, leadership is supposed to be subordinated to proletarian power through party discipline, mass supervision, and state control over capital. Corruption is a contradiction of the socialist transition period, not proof that the entire project is invalid. Treating it that way is infantile.

Look at the CPC. They openly recognize corruption as a systemic danger and run continuous anti-corruption campaigns that jail and execute billionaires, senior officials, and generals. Compare that to liberal “democracies,” where corruption is legalized via lobbying and campaign finance and a blind eye being turned when those already blurred lines are crossed.

Take Jack Ma. When he tried to push aggressive financialization that would have subordinated productive industry to speculative capital, he was disciplined and his empire was reined in. In the United States, the same behavior is rewarded, normalized, and expanded. Finance capital literally writes policy.

In socialism, capital is constrained by the state; in capitalism, the state is owned by capital.

Saying “democracy is the only hope” without asking democracy for which class is pure liberal abstraction. Bourgeois democracy just rotates which capitalist is managing the country. It does not challenge capital itself.

And “remove humans from leadership”? That’s tech-utopian nonsense. Machines don’t resolve class contradictions. Only organized masses do.

Yes, money corrupts. Yes, corruption exists. Marxists already understand this. The answer isn’t abolishing government by decree, it’s proletarian state power, continuous class struggle, mass line, and strict control over capital during the transition to communism.

Reducing all this to “power corrupts, therefore everything is invalid” is not serious. It’s just nihilist bullshit.

They enforce their authority on others, by force when necessary they are “authoritarian”. Being accountable to their supporters in their areas doesn’t change that. Until their is a global overthrow of class society by necessity their will be power structures where one class has authority and another doesn’t. All governments/movements/classes that have been or are, are “authoritarian”.

This renders authoritarian a useless term for analysis and as such has relegated it to being used to paint groups/movements/governments as evil or immoral should they stand outside liberal sensibilities.

I understand what you’re saying it’s just not relevant.

What does this have to do with anything? None of this word salad even approaches the point we were talking about. The Zapatista movement is “authoritarian” just like every governing body that has been or is (who they serve is irrelevant to being or not being “authoritarian”). Authoritarian is a useless buzzword used mostly by liberals to smear movements and countries they don’t like.

So? They institutionally dominated the region kicking out the cartels, US and Mexican government. They are authoritarian just as every form of governance is. Who the “authoritarianism” affects is a separate question.

On Authority

Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is an act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon, all of which are highly authoritarian means.