Fair enough, I mostly agree. I can imagine that China, Vietnam, and Laos are on the list because of, uh, capitalist roading, and the DPRK is nationalist to a reactionary degree and kind of culty, but what criticism would you apply to Cuba? Do they do capitalist roading too? I don’t hear much about them in that regard.

Is it your stance that every nominally Marxist country is actually Marxist? That there are no revisionist countries even though, for example, the USSR spent most of its existence being revisionist?

I always thought that communism has been proven not to work multiple times throughout history.

The more accurate lesson would be that communist nations have been defeated by capitalist hegemony multiple times throughout history, mainly during the Cold War; the countries didn’t just implode of their own accord. Now, it’s fair to criticize them for this, if you have an ideology all about material conditions and then you aren’t able to survive those conditions, you probably messed up, but I think that’s a very different assertion from “communism doesn’t work”.

You probably want to replace “atheism” with “antitheism” in that context. I would disagree either way, but I think you’d have a point with antitheism.

I apologize about the language bit. I rarely get a liberal arguing about this who wouldn’t use such a term as “comrade” derisively.

Anyway, I explained the reason I shared it, which is that it is:

showing Stalin getting outvoted on a basic ideological issue by revisionists.

But that’s not precisely what you asked for, I just don’t have a good source on your real question.

As for your books, you may realize that I am a bit short on time and do not have the energy to read 4 entire novel-length books instead of specific pages or chapters.

Let me start by saying that the general idea of this response is fair, but I checked and I think it’s only 3 books, two of which are novella-length at best (I think the Losurdo one is a bit longer). I would furthermore like to encourage you to click on the link and glance at The Soviet World because it has a nice hyperlinked table of contents and most of the individual sections, clearly labeled by topic, are just a few pages each.

I believe the idea is that the person saying that is clearly a hypocrite who has no grounds for their decrying of violence when they support so much of it, and possibly that retaliatory violence in self-defense is therefore justified.

Is this the sort of thing you’re looking for?

Within a few weeks after the 13th Congress Pravda published Stalin’s report…. Stalin’s report also contained an attack on Zinoviev, though without naming him:

“It is often said that we have the dictatorship of the party. I recall that in one of our resolutions, even, it seems, a resolution of the 12th Congress, such an expression was allowed to pass, through an oversight of course. Apparently some comrades think that we have a dictatorship of the party and not of the working class. But that is nonsense, comrades.”

Of course Stalin knew perfectly well that Zinoviev in his political report to the 12th Congress had put forward the concept of the dictatorship of the party and had sought to substantiate it. It was not at all through an oversight that the phrase was included in the unanimously adopted resolution of the Congress.

Zinoviev and Kamenev, reacting quite sharply to Stalin’s thrust, insisted that a conference of the core leadership of the party be convened. The result was a gathering of 25 Central Committee members, including all members of the Politburo. Stalin’s arguments against the “dictatorship of the party” were rejected by a majority vote, and an article by Zinoviev reaffirming the concept was approved for publication in the Aug. 23, 1924 issue of Pravda as a statement by the editors. At this point Stalin demonstratively offered to resign, but the offer was refused.

-Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 144

This is from an explicitly anti-“Stalinism” book showing Stalin getting outvoted on a basic ideological issue by revisionists.

For the record, I do think that historical texts by “comrades,” as you sneer, can be interesting and insightful, but I mostly concern myself with texts by liberals (or otherwise anti-communist ideologies) because I know those are the only ones that won’t be rejected out of hand.

I already said there are valid complaints (and again, I dislike it and don’t use it), I simply believe that the hate being so emphatic is because of sinophobia, though a lot of people wouldn’t say it openly (though the “crazies” do, as you say, and there are a lot of “crazies” on Steam and Reddit").

I think it’s that a Chinese company owns significant stake in them. I agree that they certainly aren’t improving the platform

Sinophobia. There are valid complaints about the platform, to be clear (and I personally don’t like or use it!), but the reason is recieves so much dislike is Sinophobia. We even got a dweeb saying “Chinese spyware” in this very thread.

I don’t think the new assassination fad is especially productive, but a complete state monopoly on violence would definitely not be an improvement. Trump can take a few bullets, it doesn’t matter.

You’ll probably need to think beyond liberal dogma if you want to solve a problem with liberalism. “Paying for something is speech and therefore unimpeachable” is an insane thing to take as a fundamental element of how society is run when the end result is so obviously and demonstrably the rich using that ruling (which was always made for them) to buy elections.

People want to find some policy wonk solution to these fundamental problems (“Oh! Sortition fixes everything! Wait, maybe a parliamentary system. Ooh, ooh, how about . . .”) but they are just red herrings, silly schemes that distract you from critical thought about the assumptions that brought you here.

If diverse opinions were allowed, what was the entire focus on eradicating factionalism?

The general line according to Stalin (e.g. in “Foundations of Leninism”) was that there should be thorough and exhaustive debates among those with differing opinions within the Party but that, once a resolution was reached by a vote following the debate, further fighting on the topic as a Party official was essentially a form of wrecking, though of course matters were revisited periodically (for good and for ill). Even if you disagreed, you were then expected to go along with whatever the motion was in the interest of the integrity of the Party as an actor. This was “Diversity of opinion, unity of action” [edit: I got the motto slightly wrong, see cowbee]

I don’t really have a developed opinion on it (I guess I should have left this to cowbee for that reason) but I definitely have sympathy for this approach when I look at it in the context of glory hounds like Trotsky being constantly contrarian for the sake of political brinkmanship instead of, you know, acting in good faith and believing in things besides that he should be top dog. There shouldn’t be tolerance for people like that, and the long-term harm that Trotsky’s opposition bloc did to the SU is hard to fathom.

where it means that everyone must vote whatever the elite thinks

citation needed

I disagree about sortition, but I appreciate pushing back on elitist, misanthropic bullshit like you did. I think elections with a strong ability to quickly recall faithless representatives is a much better solution because it involves the decision-making of the whole community, rather than a community member chosen at random.

Seems like campaign finance reform is a more pertinent question then.

I’ve always really loved Zarbon. He has a cool design that fits his snobbish attitude and then when he sacrifices his looks to transform into his grotesque true form, to was a good foreshadowing of Frieza.

Also the Ginyu Force, of course. Ginyu himself is great and even the oft-overlooked Guldo is pretty interesting (and DBZ needs more weird bullshit powers like his).

Yeah, you’re probably right

Which West Germany didn’t face?

We already established they had a Nazi problem

the latter is more of that “librul witchcraft” of globalization.

Again, the poverty in the region was longstanding and persists even today.

the Soviets brutalized the East, and that left a legacy of uneducated poverty.

I’m not impressed with your link, remember that the West had the RAF, which enjoyed a fair deal of popular support. I’d also need a source on things like poor education since socialist states historically are the most consistently excellent at things like mass literacy (though of course modern Germany is fine in that regard).

So it’s reduced to “They were poor” which was always the case and is still the case, though at least there was virtually no homelessness in the East, which the West and notably modern Germany cannot say.

Oh, and you’re right there were no camps in East Germany, those camps were in the USSR

I said death camps, which the USSR also didn’t have. Labor camps are just a form of prison labor that people use the Holocaust’s work-to-death camps to sound more brutal than they are. Prison labor was also practiced in West Germany, is practiced in modern Germany, and is practiced in whatever liberal state you like. The equivocation here is really the peak of the “Soviets were also Nazis” bullshit that is of course popular with the aggrieved German liberals and anticommunist historians the world over.

Well no, there’s one step further, but I hope we can avoid talking about it because it doesn’t concern Germany.