Deng was definitely playing with fire, though as you suggest the PRC was much more in control of the burn than the other capitalist powers. Had I come into communism about 5-10 years earlier than I did my position would be much closer to yours. However, it seems to me the Xi administration has been doing a good job cutting the excesses and purging capitalist roaders. They have a lot more work to do, but they seem best equipped to fight the class struggle, both domestically and internationally, of any country.

I suppose then the question is if it's just a very-disciplined capitalist power or a socialist one, because Xi is doing a great job of maintaining and developing the state, but I don't think anything he is doing is incompatible with just being a responsible capitalist politician running a tight ship.

There's should never be shame about ruthless criticism of all that exists.

Yeah, I just wanted to make it clear that it's not a "the authoritarian mods are silencing me" issue and just that I don't feel like arguing about this most of the time, though I decided to here.

The rightly-praised train system is not for-profit, but they make a killing on oil, for example.

I'm not an economist, I can't really tell you why that's what they do, but I'm pretty confident they do it.

That there would be some amount of revisionism is precisely my expectation of AES states. It's not like I said they weren't socialist -- and from a practical standpoint we can say pretty confidently that they all are, most especially the DPRK and Cuba.

"Revisionist" is basically shorthand for "deviating in some way from fundamental Marxist principles" which is a subset of "erroneous from a Marxist perspective".

"No true scotsman" isn't just a vibe, it's a specific type of fallacy. If I say that "No X is Y" and you say "I know John, he's an X and he is Y" and I reply "He's not really X then, because no true X is Y," I am performing the fallacy in its most archetypal form. Basically, it is asserting that no member of a group has some (usually negative) trait and, when confronted with a counterexample, saying that the presence of the trait in that example means the example wasn't really a member of the group.

Dumb college kids do indeed do "no true scotsman" all the time when reactionaries say "reds killed trillions" and they say "but that wasn't real communism, man" to preserve their ignorant idealization without really understanding either Marxist theory or the actual evidence around AES history.

I don't have anything that I'm trying to disavow, and in fact am making claims of various kinds against these states (though I might have been unfair to Cuba, admittedly) without any interest in protecting some group of "true scotsman".

It certainly is not a liberal capitalist state as such, though the bourgeoisie represent a real force as you imply, but there is also capitalism in state industries when they are run for profit, which currently is the bulk of China's economy.

I think people jump to "Read On Authority" to quickly, a behavior that amounts to scripture-quoting, but

I just threw it into chatgpt, I think I understand now. It's basically saying that some level of authority is necessary for society to function (which I wouldn't have argued against otherwise).

chatgpt sucks and has demonstrated that again here. On Authority essentially argues that a socialist revolution 1: is itself a monumental exercise of authority and 2: requires authority to be protected when it exists in a world fundamentally hostile to it. There are some ancillary arguments about command structures, but overall it is written in opposition to anarchist dogmatism about "Authority" being an evil thing that must be discarded.

I'll let someone else unpack the "Stalinist Russia" part

China is plainly revisionist since the Deng reforms, it went from a uniquely (sometimes chaotically) democratic ML state to a capitalist state run with some amount of propriety and discipline (perhaps owing to both its Marxist immediate past and its Confucian past before that) and that unusually "adult" behavior for such a powerful country I think contributes to confusion, because people expect capitalist states to be rotten from skin to core like the US or Occupied Korea or something.

I still think, mainly for reasons already expressed, that China is the biggest historically progressive force in the world right now (the most progressive force among established countries is Cuba, of course), the average westerner knows nothing but lies about it, etc.

But I basically think every AES state is revisionist in some respect -- Vietnam is similar to China here, Cuba is on the road to joining them, the DPRK has reactionary nationalism, Laos is just a fucking mess -- but I still support them all, not just on anti-imperial grounds but also because this isn't all-or-nothing, you can be revisionist in some respects and correct in others, and even massive revisionists in this backward word can still be historically progressive forces.

This isn't me mindlessly lionizing Mao either, I think he was (by the end of his life) a left deviationist who nonetheless failed to pull the trigger on Deng, but his ideas were definitely more sincere in their aspirations Marxism over economism or however you'd like to characterize Deng.

It might be nice to have better discussions on these topics, but I'm not going to pretend its a George Orwell 1909043 wrongthink issue, I mostly come here for the news aggregation and comments thereon, not to refine the new vanguard.

Are quips like this really what it has come to?

What sense of "Maoist" do you mean here? Like Shining Path or just anti-Deng?

Strictly speaking, the most common sentiment in GZD and HB is highly revisionist. I don't really mind since it's still progressive and splitting over that would be absurd, but their claim of deviation makes enough sense to be comprehended if they're a hardliner in the vein of either Mao or Hoxha.

Something can be aggressively decontextualized and still not sugar-coated

One is a country, one is an individual, to say that any individual is more important to the war than the United States is the literal definition of Great Man Theory (i.e. childish nonsense).

This is without getting into other considerations like how Netanyahu is a scapegoat for faux-progressives who want to deflect away from how this genocide has enthusiastic support from many powerful institutions within Israel. It is an Israeli project much more than Netanyahu's personal project.

P.S. Assassinating Putin wouldn't end the war in Ukraine either (nor would assassinating Zelensky or Biden)

You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye.

Matthew 7:5

Just wait until you find out how popular aryanism still is with basically any group of white people in the world outside of maybe some of Ireland.

Honestly an interesting concept for a tomb, making a living space for a dead person.

The NED is notorious for basically being a CIA cut-out

Specific people or archetypal people?

I can't know everything about every topic.

As Mao would say, "No Investigation, No Right to Speak"

My suggestion is to not get into extremely pointless historical relitigations with your partner over Stalin. Even if you knew what you were talking about, it would be a shame to tank your relationship over something that doesn't materially matter to either of you. As it is, you're repeating profoundly edgy memes to a comparatively normal person and then acting like it's their problem they are put off by it.

"Stalin didn't kill enough fuckers" is true, but mainly when you understand "fuckers" to mean "reactionaries imperiling the ML project" rather than just "people." There were many people, most notably during the "Great Purge," who were killed by the government and emphatically did not deserve it ("But it was Yezhov's fault!" true or not, you'd need to establish Ezovchina lore first.)

Someone else will probably handle the other aspects, but if no one does you can ping me

Projection is a played-out accusation, but where the fuck do Democrats get off accusing leftists of being grandstanding and sanctimonious?

Not trying to tell you how you should identify though. None of my business.

No worries, I appreciate you sharing too