A poor translation of an idiotic point as I would expect given everything to this point

Yeah big issue with your attempt to demean me with your shitty meme you couldn’t even be bothered to find is that I am neither white nor a denizen of the imperial core. I am also absolutely not a Third Worldist. I am a Marxist-Leninist. I even have a Master’s in Marxist theory (not that that is particularly relevant in this context beyond credential-stuffing.). My positions come from study grounded in practice, not abstraction.

You aren’t stricter in your reading, you’re more dogmatic, and thus unscientific. That’s a massive break from the core of Marxist socialism, which demands analysis of concrete conditions, not the application of invariant formulae. You are a settler operating with much arrogance and little understanding beyond the academic exercise you take socialism to be. This is the pattern of many modern “ultra” flavours in the imperial core: much “critique” from the margins, zero real engagement with the material contradictions of actually-existing socialism. I hope one day you can grow up and move beyond your infantile disorder, best of luck to you.

Sure thing settler

It appears continuing further will unfortunately be entirely unproductive. Your reply is clearly bad faith (I had hoped we could have at least some meaningful interaction but that was never your interest.): idiotic name-calling because you lack the theoretical capacity to engage with substance, zero grasp of formalism and how it directly negates Marxism’s scientific method, nearing functional illiteracy with your inability to hold or meaningfully respond to a single argument actually made, and CIA brainworms that have you wielding “Stalinist” as a slur while you plug your ears and turn away from reality. You project your own utopian immediatism onto me, demand purity tests instead of material analysis, and substitute sectarian noise for revolutionary practice. I stand by my opening conclusion that I was beginning to think was perhaps too harsh but now realise was directly on point. You have an understanding of theory and reality equivalent to that of the most learned dust mite yet hold an arrogance when you talk far greater than the most arrogant emperor.

A formalist reading of Marx is not just wrong. It abandons the soul of scientific socialism and borders on the reactionary. It substitutes legal abstractions for the analysis of concrete social relations and replaces historical materialism with moralistic catechism.

Your watch analogy is idiotic. A watch is not a means of production. Conflating personal possession with capitalist private property shows you have not grasped the most elementary distinction in Marxist theory. Private property is a social relation that enables the extraction of surplus labour through exclusion and market enforcement. Administering a gift does not let you exploit wage labour. Your bank analogy is equally empty. Try exercising your supposed “ownership” by walking into that bank and demanding to appropriate that capital you “own” as personal wealth. See how fast the social relation of capital reasserts itself through law, force, and institutional discipline. Administration is not ownership. Your confusion reveals a complete lack of conception of private property as a social relation.

Your point about public land, firefighters, and internet services under capitalism is detached from both theory and reality. Thatcherites privatized public land on a massive scale. Tech firms and telecom monopolies wage constant campaigns to enclose the digital commons and commodify every facet of the internet. The fact that capitalism tolerates or even manages certain public functions currently does not negate its driving logic. These are concessions wrung from capital or functional necessities for reproducing labour power, not evidence of a different mode of production.

Your KMT comparison remains idiotic even after clarification. Yes, both the KMT and the USSR employed state centralization. But form without content is idealism. The USSR broke private property relations in land and industry. The KMT preserved landlordism and comprador capital. The class character of state power and the direction of surplus allocation were fundamentally opposed. To ignore this is to reduce Marxism to a checklist of administrative techniques. That is not analysis. It is fetishism.

On planning under capitalism, you swing and miss again. Aid to Israel is not a benevolent decree. It is the outcome of a bidding war between arms firms, lobbying blocs, and imperial strategy, all mediated through the logic of accumulation. Sweden building apartments is not socialism. It is the imperial core using super-exploitation of the periphery to fund social peace at home. Ignore austerity, the housing crisis, and the privatization creep across Scandinavia if you like. Ignore the private health insurance racket in America if it suits your argument. But do not pretend these are equivalent to socialist planning.

Scandinavian economies do not subordinate firms to the public good. Private ownership remains the principle. Decommodification is tactical, contingent, and constantly under assault. Under socialism, social ownership is the principle and capital is repressed. That absolutely determines the direction of travel. The USSR, for most of its existence, directed surplus to industrialization, universal education, healthcare, and defence against imperialism. That is not a minor variation. It is a qualitative break.

When I say the law of value cannot be abolished by decree, I mean exactly what Marx meant. You can issue all the plans you want. Without the proper material conditions and productive forces, they will not amount to shit. That is why socialism is a transitional phase. It is the process of creating those conditions through planned development, class struggle, and the gradual withering of commodity relations. To demand the immediate absence of all market forms is to demand socialism without history. That is not revolutionary. It is utopian.

Your “necessary communization” point is equally detached. Postal services, education, social security: all are under active assault by capital. Privatization of public assets is a global trend (outside the remaining socialist holdouts). Social security in the imperial core is funded by imperial rent and is in structural decline as the periphery liberates itself. Austerity has been the dominant policy for over a decade. To cite these as evidence that capitalism already does what socialism does is to ignore the direction of travel and the class struggle over every concession.

Finally, your deflection about personal hardship misses the point entirely. Your precarity is likely real (if you’re telling the truth) and is produced by the system we oppose. But having no practice in building socialism, as a settler denizen of the imperial core, renders your theory a purely academic exercise. That is why your arguments are so detached from both reality and theory. Revolutionary clarity is not forged in grievance. It is forged through study, practice, and alignment with the movement of the working class. Bordigist purism offers the comfort of certainty without the burden of construction. It is easy to declare every actually existing socialist project impure from the safety of the core. If your theory cannot account for the struggle to build under constraint, it is not a meaningful or worthwhile guide to action. You have not refuted anything. You have only repeated your formalist catechism with more words and less understanding.

He is undoubtedly an idiot for equating the USSR with the KMT.

However (and this very clearly isn’t what he meant) under Dr Sun Yat-sen, the KMT wasn’t fascist but a nebulous anti-imperialist bourgeois-centrist style formation: the New Three Principles allowed united front work because they objectively opposed feudalism and foreign domination.

It wasn’t until after Dr Sun’s death, the internal KMT ideological struggle resolved in favor of the landlord-comprador wing, and fascism was then formalised under Chiang.

Your “argument” rests on a formalist reading of Marx that confuses legal categories with social relations. An owning class is defined by private appropriation of surplus and the ability to reproduce that power through inheritance and market competition. The Soviet nomenklatura held administrative authority, not private property. They could not sell factories, bequeath positions, or extract profit as personal wealth. That is a qualitative difference.

Comparing the USSR to the KMT shows some impressive ignorance and ignores the rupture in property relations. The KMT preserved landlordism and comprador capital. The Soviet state expropriated both.

Planning under capitalism coordinates individual firms while leaving social reproduction to market anarchy. Socialist planning, however imperfect, subordinates enterprise activity to social goals: full employment, universal services, industrial catch up. The presence of markets or external trade does not erase that direction of travel.

The law of value cannot be abolished by decree because it is a social relation, not a policy. Marx was explicit in the Critique of the Gotha Programme: right can never be higher than the economic structure of society. Socialism constrains the law of value through planned allocation, price controls, and decommodification. It withers through development, not proclamation.

International conflicts between socialist states reflect the pressure of the capitalist world system and unresolved national questions, not an inherent capital logic. Uneven development, border disputes, and great power chauvinism are real contradictions. They demand critique, but they do not settle the class character of a mode of production.

Prussia modernized under Junker aristocracy and state led development, but it never socialized the means of production or aimed at the withering of the state. Achievements in literacy or industry under socialism are not “just development”. They are the result of surplus being directed to social need rather than private accumulation.

Bordigist purity spectacles are a luxury of those like yourself, a settler, denizen of the imperial core whose only interaction with socialism is as an academic exercise. You have built nothing, defended nothing, and achieved nothing. You demand a socialism that arrives without contradiction, without transition, without struggle. Revolutionary practice must engage with concrete conditions, not ideal blueprints. If your standard for socialism is the immediate absence of all market forms, all state mediation, all external trade, then you have defined it out of historical possibility. You clearly wish to appear revolutionary without the effort of grappling with reality.

Trade predates capitalism and has taken different forms under different modes of production. Its existence under socialism does not make a society capitalist. What defines a social system is who controls the means of production and how surplus labour is allocated.

The Soviet Union inherited a devastated, largely agrarian economy encircled by imperialist states. Socialist construction could not skip stages. Public ownership of industry, finance and land became the foundation. Market mechanisms and limited private trade operated within boundaries set by the plan, not as its driving force.

Under socialism, the law of value is not abolished by decree. It is progressively constrained through planning, price regulation, and the expansion of decommodified services. Policies like the NEP were not retreats from socialism but applications of materialist method: you transform society with the conditions you inherit, not with ideal blueprints.

To dismiss the USSR because it engaged in trade is to mistake form for content. Socialism is a transitional process, not a finished state. It shifts power from capital to labour, expands collective provision, and subordinates exchange to social need. By these measures, the Soviet project lifted hundreds of millions from illiteracy and poverty, built industrial capacity from scratch, and defended social gains against relentless external pressure.

Please refrain from arrogance when your understanding of a topic matches that of the most learned dust mite.

There’s no embarrassment, I think I can speak for all Marxists Leninists when I say

ladies and gentlemen, I say it without flinching: communism in eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba brought land reform and human services; a dramatic bettering of the living conditions of hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or never since witnessed in human history, and that’s something to appreciate. Communism transformed desperately poor countries into societies in which everyone had adequate food, shelter, medical care, and education, and some of us who come from poor families who carry around the hidden injuries of class are very impressed; are very, very impressed by these achievements and are not willing to dismiss them as economistic.

We support the DPRK for all it’s done for its people who the EuroAmerikans waged a war of extermination on. And not only their people but the oppressed people of the world, from the Americas to Africa supporting anti imperialist struggle the world over.

As a leftist journalist you wouldn’t go to Venezuela, Laos, Vietnam, China or Cuba?

Also:

Your opening is the standard lazy shitlib straw man. Saying term limits are anti-democratic does not mean “give Trump a third term,” it means voters should decide rather than having the state pre-emptively remove options from the ballot. That is what a term limit is. It’s not some magical anti-corruption device, but an arbitrary legal restriction on who people are allowed to vote for, imposed on the theory that limiting democracy somehow protects democracy. In practice it does nothing to fix donor capture, party corruption, media manipulation, or institutional decay; it just narrows voter choice while the same unelected interests keep their power completely untouched. The rest of your reply is you wandering off into a generic rant about the two-party system and independents, which has nothing to do with the actual point I made.

This is literally me. This is exactly what I would believe if I was illiterate.

I didn’t say anything about age limits. My point was about term limits: they reduce voter choice based on an arbitrary claim that they function as some kind of harm-reduction mechanism, which is hard to take seriously given how obviously dysfunctional the American system is. Term limits do not solve elite capture, corruption, or institutional failure; they just act as another inertial mechanism that constrains democratic choice and blocks the kind of massive structural change the U.S. clearly needs. Most of your reply was a rant about broader problems I never said anything about, but none of it actually answered the point I made.

I take no issue with that I just think you were misdiagnosing the issues as downstream of a single law as opposed to structural inevitability of the capitalist system whether that specific law exists or not.

Improving lives is generally good. The question is whether people are clear about what they are winning.

I was replying in this very thread to someone calling higher minimum wages and taxes on the rich the solution. That is the problem. Measures like that can be worth fighting for, but they are not a solution. They are stopgaps within the same system that created the crisis.

That matters because without that understanding people mistake temporary concessions for lasting change. They win reforms, are told the problem is solved, pressure drops, and then those reforms are rolled back as soon as capital regains the initiative. We have seen that repeatedly, including in Europe where social protections were swept back once the political balance shifted.

That is not criticizing anything short of perfection. It is insisting on political clarity. Fight for every immediate gain you can win, yes. But understand that unless the system itself is broken, those gains remain limited, fragile, and easily reversible.

I’m not against stopgaps in themselves. If you do not have the power to force real change, then immediate achievable demands make sense. Working people need relief, and there is nothing wrong with fighting for rent caps, wage rises, debt relief, public housing, or stronger labour rights.

What I object to is pretending those things are the solution. They are not. They are stopgaps. They can ease the pressure for a time, but they do not remove the system that produces the crisis in the first place. They do not end landlordism, finance capital, monopoly power, imperialism, or production for profit. They manage the symptoms.

Fight for reforms where they are all you can win. But understand them for what they are. Temporary measures, not emancipation. The crisis of capitalism does not have a reformist solution. Its only solution is the overthrow of the system itself.

Term limits are antidemocratic and largely unhelpful as they disincentivise long term thinking. There’s a reason Amerikkka only put them in place in 1951 after FDR.

I think a lot of problems of late stage capitalism are downstream consequences from this stupid law.

Not really. Capital accumulation above all else is what makes capitalism capitalism. Even without that specific law the system as a whole incentivises and and pushes towards this end.

No that’s not the solution, that’s a stopgap at best. A mild reform. It does nothing to address the core contradictions that drive capitalist crisis.

It’s fun and it fills gaps in the day like commuting or dead time at work etc I wouldn’t bother otherwise.