sodium_nitride [she/her, any]

No it boils down to “we kicked the Japanese fascists out and have a pretty decent standard of living now compared to the rest of the world”

Not OP, but you can easily find statistics on public transportation, wages, healthcare/life expectancy, government approval, ecological policies, technological development, energy use and so on.

Collecting these statistics takes too much time for a single comment, but you can find statistics from a wide variety of sources such as the world bank, imf, rand (western sources), or Chinese sources like Chinese government data (like from the national burea of statistics).

Either way, the data is quite favorable for China and Chinese citizen’s quality of life. They have a higher life expectancy than Americans, world class public transport, the world’s best green energy industrial complex (by such a huge margin that in comparison, the rest of the world might as well not try). It is quite a decent place to live in, baring the issues with low wages, youth unemployment and high working hours (compared to western nations, as least until the fascists de-develop the west enough).

unless they are rival imperialists in which case the “bone to grind” is with imperialism.

This is where the issue comes down to because many western leftists pretend, based on their own misunderstandings that many western rivals are imperialists, despite the fact that many of these western rivals have a net export of surplus labor/commodities, being exploited by international capital, therby having a class interest opposite of imperialism.

Not to mention the military encirclement that these nations face, which their enemy nationalists take as some sort of natural God-given equilibrium. Deviating from this encirclement by forceful measures is then taken as a sign of evil/imperialist ambition, meanwhile leftists at home in the west fail to resolve military encirclement by pressuring their governments. I mean, for how many decades has Cuba been under a blockade? What horrific conditions gaza has been subjected to. Can any of these situations be resolved without force? And if these people use force, they get called imperialists.

In the interests of fairness, the PRC during Mao and Deng’s time also famously considered the USSR to be “social imperialists”, helping cause the downfall of the USSR and setting back socialism by a century. So this isn’t exclusively a western leftist problem.

“Our glorious people’s Ministry of Truth has determined that their wretched Mistry of Truth is lying while assuring us that OUR Ministry of Truth would never lie”

My sibling in christ, do not insult my intelligence. The gaza genocide isn’t even over. At least wait for the bodies to become cold before you start defending western media institutions.

I don’t know what you’re trying to do here, encouraging racism instead of criticism of the state?

It is a common deflection that I have seen. Furthermore, it is quite stupid as well, since governments don’t fall from the heavens. They are made from the people. Modern states are not small warlord bands, but significant fractions of the entire populace and economy.

None, if you’re a principled anarchist. That’s why I don’t have a fundamental problem with anarchists (other than my philosophical objections to anarchism)

However, many self-proclaimed anarchists do in practice support imperialists because they have a big bone to grind with AES states or even anyone who positions themselves against western imperialism.

They internalise western propaganda against these states/nations, because I guess, it’s a state so therefore it must be as comically evil as the worst fearmongering described by anglophone media. Or my favorite, “even only 10% of the atrocities were real, they would still be super evil”, that kind of thinking.

Of course, I have some contact both with actual chinese or russian people (many of whom aren’t even socialists), and they clearly have a much deeper and nuanced understanding of their nations than the even the most “I hate the government not the people” type of western anarchists. It makes the anarchists come off as silly white supremacists.

Most likely, if my contact with anarchists had begun with third world anarchists, I would never have had a phase of hating anarchists (which itself was a silly thing to do). But either way, I still find Marx more compelling than any anarchist writer, so I am still philosophically a Marxist.

I read marx/lenin, found them to be compelling.

I am very interested in the science of economic planning and ecosystem management.

Originally, I considered myself to be an anarchist, but other anarchists had a very strong tendency of supporting imperialists in their actions against non-western countries, and frankly, I’m not white enough to be tempted by the benefits I would not be gaining from installing rightist dictatorships in Venezuela or China or Cuba if the “anarcho-bidenist” types had their way.

Looking back at it I find the whole “fight” between anarchism and marxism-leninism to be very silly, but since I think that China and Hamas are actually doing useful work, this automatically makes me incompatible with many anarchists.