This was my senior year of college. I would stay up all night playing Counterstrike and Day of Defeat.

I think that’s called being an influencer.

What is an addiction other than acting against your self interest? Nuclear proliferation is objectively a bad thing for humanity as a whole. It is game theory (another concept not included with Marx’s archaic concepts) that causes nations to act against their interests by endangering us all with nuclear weapons.

capital is at the driver’s seat, not humans

Capital can’t make decisions, only humans.

There is no such thing as a "political class.

Another way that Marx fails. The president can own no capital (ex. Carter) but can command the largest army in the world and fire nuclear weapons as they choose. Actually ownership of capital is irrelevant. Control of capital is what matters. Power is what matters.

The iconic Tank Man photo was taken by AP photographer Jeff Widener, but several photographers shot the event.

sneakily leaving out the fact he was stopping tanks leaving the area.

That is the entire point of the photo. He was stopping tanks being used to suppress protests.

It wasn’t one cohesive protest but tens of factions with their own agendas from hard-line maoists wanting to rollback reforms to students wanting more consumer goods and the end of the focus on supporting the peasantrybat the time.

Doesn’t really matter what position the protestors held. Their speech was suppressed by your government. You keep ignoring that.

I’m going to end this here.

Because you can’t admit the truth. All you can do is keep playing the race card.

Yeah if you talk to other white racist westerners who are only interested in spreading orientalist nonsense like yourself and confirming their racist bias.

This is what happens when the Chinese people don’t have free speech. You can only repeat the lies your government tells you. The Tank Man picture is one of the most iconic photographs in the history of mankind. If he was free, you don’t think some journalist at some point would have interviewed him? Seriously think about it.

Between 2 and 6 hundred including soldiers killed by rioters.

By the best estimates by historians not trying to push the CCP or western agendas, 14 soldiers were killed. Around 3,000 protestors occupied the square and held a 7 day hunger strike. They were protesting for economic reasons and for greater political representation. In response the government declared martial law, clearing the square with military force. Hundreds, perhaps thousands were shot, beaten to death, or crushed by armored vehicles. The dead were collected by soldiers, loaded onto trucks, and dumped in unmarked graves. Because of this, no exact number of dead can be known. Reliable estimates vary from several hundred to thousands of dead. We can debate all you want about the death toll, but the fact is that this is what happens when you try to speak freely in China. The CCP does not tolerate free speech. If you go against the party you disappear.

What a disgusting and terrible framing. Unfortunately typical of chauvinist white saviour racists such as yourself.

You are absolutely right. I mistyped. I meant to say “How many people did the Chinese government murder in Tienanmen square?” Care to answer? How many were killed?

He talked with the tank operator before passersby ushered him off

Where he was arrested and executed or imprisoned for 20+ years depending on who you talk to.

How many people did the Chinese people murder in Tienanmen square? What happened after this picture was taken?

I was speaking more broadly about the constitutionality of being charged under a destruction of property statute. In a sense, deleting your data is choosing to remain silent.

Removed by mod

The thing is, data isn’t just property. It is also speech. The right to remain silent is so fundamental to the legal system that a whole case can be thrown out if you are not reminded of this right while being arrested.

It is an objective fact that Chinese citizens have no right to free speech. Nothing I have said is racist. The fact that you have to resort to personal attacks just shows you know I am right.

What is it with you whiteys calling me and my family serfs and your complete lack of understanding of my country.

Because my country allows free speech and I can speak the truth, unlike you.

People largely partake as coping mechanisms or to fit in with groups etc. which would be in their immediate perceived interest of coping, fitting in etc.

They still know it is against their best interests.

Addressing global warming would impact the bottom lines of the capitalist class and thus be against their interest as a class of constant accumulation and expansion to among other things fight the falling rate of profit.

See previous answer.

Having nuclear weapons is directly in the self interest of states that wish to remain sovereign and not be destroyed by the western US lead empire as has been proved repeatedly.

It is against the best interest of humanity as a whole and we all know it.

Not a thing. Class is predicated on relation to the means of production mainly the ability/lack there of to privately own productive property and appropriate surplus value as capital.

It’s a thing in reality. It’s not a thing in Marxism which is another fault of the philosophy. The political class controls the capital that ostensibly belongs to the people. On reality they often wield the power of that capital for their own ends. This is true regardless of the economic system.

If the USSRs collapse was due to an inherent issue with Marxism why hasn’t the PRC collapsed?

Because the PRC Isn’t Marxist. It is a totalitarian dictatorship run for the benefit of the ruling class where the people are little more than serfs toiling for their local lords. The whole “communism” thing is an opiate similar to religion which encourages people to make personal sacrifices and not rise up.

If you just say this without elaborating on the how and in what way it’s meaningless.

One of the central points of Marxism is that socialism is a transitional phase that leads to communism. This has never happened.

The dialectical materialist theory of knowledge is not a scientific hypothesis that can be “disproven” in a laboratory, but rather a philosophical framework. Critics widely reject it because it is unfalsifiable, imposes abstract rules onto empirical science, and relies on vague definitions.

They both believe themselves to be acting in their own interests.

You are missing the point. Their class interest is not their only interest. Various interests can take precedence over class interest.

People outside of the communist party could and did run.

Were they allowed to win? How often did they “accidentally” fall out of windows? Were the votes for them actually counted? No, the USSR was not a democracy. There was no free speech. The government heavily policed and punished dissent. Without free speech there can be no democracy.

As for Mamdani, you’ll find that he cannot implement socialism even if he wanted to.

You should know that democratic socialism is different and he is already implementing it. He is creating real tangible change. Sure, he can’t transform the whole system alone, but for one person in a position of power he is doing a lot. Your idea that a cabal of capitalists control the government is nothing less than a conspiracy theory.

Your assertion that people on average knowingly work against their own self-interest requires mountains of evidence.

Alcoholism and drug addiction? Failure to address global warming? Nuclear proliferation?

but the entire class of the proletariat above the rest of the classes

And the proletariat was below the political class.

because reforms under Gorbachev undermined the socialist system,

So much for the democratic system you claimed existed. It’s almost like that is an inherently failing of Marxism.

China is in the developing stages of socialism.

No country has ever gone beyond the developing stages of socialism because Marx was wrong.

It’s not that greed or altruism are social constructs, but that the way we think and see the world is based on how we produce and distribute.

That is literally what Marx believed. He did not believe in biology as a driver of greed in any way.

Both the woman and the man have the same class interests in collectivising the means of production and distribution.

As you point out, people act against their perceived best interests. This is driven by the non-class differences that you so easily dismiss.

As for the USSR, it was completely democratic and run by the working classes.

Objectively false. The government was run solely by the Communist Party and they could not be voted out. No competing parties were allowed. Nobody who did not belong to the Communist party could run. The system was inherently antidemocratic.

You are confusing the ability to vote for the presence of democracy, but the truth is that the only allowable choices are already preselected by the capitalist class.

Two words: Zohran Mamdani. The capitalist class does not want a brown Muslim democratic socialist running the largest city in the country. The people chose him.

You’re ignoring the perceived part as well, the self-perception is a key point.

Convenient. Any time people look like they are acting against their self interest, you can just say that people don’t “perceive” it that way and still look like you are right.

The soviet union was a dictatorship of the proletariat.

A dictator cannot be part of the proletariat by definition and the USSR failed. Communism failed.

China is run by a corrupt elite and their chosen pet oligarchs. It has an abhorrent civil rights record. It is no way a success story of a proletariat state.

Cuba’s Soviet-style command economy lowers productivity and prevents the country from fully participating in the global economy. Monetary reforms have caused massive inflation and currency devaluation. People have been abandoning the island in droves for decades because the quality of life is poor. It in no way represents a successful Communist state.

Socialism when implemented alongside capitalist policies can work. Communism has not and cannot work.

It was after the railroads had mostly been finished, so the racism took precedence. White conservatives got really scared that the Chinese would have enough population to gain significant political power. Sounds familiar?

People act in their own perceived self-interest

No, they don’t. That is where he is wrong. People frequently act against their perceived self interest out of fear, hate, mental instability, or any number of other reasons.

Further, Marx’s theories absolutely do work in practice

Ah, like the USSR? Nope. Venezuela? Nope. Cuba? Nope. China? Trick question, they adopted state capitalism in the 70s and are a totalitarian state domestically.

This is not socialism and capitalism working together, but public property helping the dominant private property in the context of a capitalist system.

Corruption is a problem with any system. Capitalism or communism is irrelevant. Marx would probably argue that greed is a social construct, but I think psychology has conclusively shown that while elements of greed are social, it is fundamentally an evolutionary adaptation (as is altruism).

The reason classes are directly related to ownership of the means of production is because classes have shared class interests.

Ownership of the means of production is just a type of power. It is the power to grant or deprive others of resources. Shared interests by class is another falsehood bred from lack of psychological understanding by Marx. A black woman who works at a grocery store in a city and a white male farmer from a rural area are the same class to Marx. However their interests are vastly different because of intersectionality (which Marx had no way to know about).

The US is a dictatorship of capital, and is far less democratic than the USSR was.

The USSR was on no way democratic. It was an authoritarian state with one party who regularly presented voters with one single party-approved candidate to vote for. The public was not allows fundamental democratic principles like freedom of speech or independent political opposition. Stalin literally won 100% of the vote because of uncontested elections.

https://www.nytimes.com/1937/12/14/archives/stalin-wins-poll-by-a-vote-of-100-no-opposition-is-shown-in-count.html

The US political system is heavily impacted by capital, but capital isn’t a single entity. It is a wide range of groups with a wide range of conflicting interests. Beyond limiting government regulation of capital and taxation, they rarely agree. Capital spends heavily influencing voters opinions, BUT the voters do still vote and those votes are counted honestly. We absolutely need to get money out of politics and we need to get rid of first past the post style voting. That being said, we are a democracy. And imperfect democracy, but a democracy.