Substitute those by corrupt assigning of contracts and public funds and pipedream “AI will extract Lithium for us” snake oil salespeople.

They’d actually build a pretty extensive and well-functioning one and then dismantle it all under pressure from car manufacturers.

What’s the distinction between owning your home being okay and owning land not being okay?

The commenter above gave you a very long answer that I think can be summarized more effectively.

The difference between personal property and private property is that private property is used for its potential for earning money, and personal property is used for its practical purpose by a person to satisfy their needs. You owning a DVD and watching it at home for pleasure is personal property, a cinema owning a DVD and playing it for profit makes it private property.

There’s no agreeing or disagreeing about philosophy anymore, whether something is used for profit or not is self evident if you apply this distinction.

Hey! I’ve spent the past days reading modern historiographical books, and I’ve done an extensive writeup on my findings. Since I’m an ML and I criticise anarchist positions in the writeup, I’m not sure whether I should post it here as a post, but if you wanna have a look at it and respond, I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.

So far I’m just learning to code harder in C getting into the nitty-gritty of the hardware. A simple but challenging enough project is a mini LED light that I can tie to my thumb in order to use my eBook better. Regulable light intensity through PWM, low-power mode for low power consumption when off, interrupts from button to power-up… Quite a few different peripherals to touch!

I installed Linux Mint and I’m having fun with some extremely cheap RISC-V microcontrollers (ch32v003) using the open source toolchain of ch32fun. Having a blast!

Neanderthal were more homo than Peaceful Sapiens

God, I’ve been reading your exchange with ThirdConsul and it’s painful. I’m sorry you have to endure this shit.

If you want an additional reference to the USSR actually subsidizing the Polish economy, Szymanski’s “Is the Red Flag Flying” goes in detail about this, and proves with economical data that 1955 onwards the USSR subjected itself to the short end of the stick of unequal exchange and provided raw materials to the COMECON countries at international market prices and below in exchange for industrially manufactured goods. Some nationalist Poles are to a certain degree aware of this and instead of framing the exchanges as “dismantling of Polish industry” as this clueless user is doing, speak of “the USSR giving us useless iron and taking finished industrial products from us”, completely devoid of any understanding of high value-added goods.

Also, the user is outright lying. The USSR absolutely warned Poland not to get into loans with the IMF, and Poland ignored it anyway, proving again Poland’s political independence within the Eastern Block.

You may wanna stop trying to talk sense into ThirdConsul, they’re a Polish nationalist who threatened me with violence when I gave evidence that the USSR subsidized Polish industry after 1955.

Thanks a lot for the sources!

Regarding the particular systems: can you provide numerical data on the amount of radars and SAM battery components? Russia provided SU-35s but AFAIK Iran has 2, which is absolutely insufficient (Russia has other limitations such as being itself at war and not being the industrial powerhouse of the world anymore).

My obvious point is that the extent of military aid is insufficient. I don’t know why you need to treat this as disinformed within a primarily communist community. I’m not accusing you of lack of awareness about the extent of aid by China, I’m just criticizing the scope of China’s aid to Iran, not as a left-punching weapon but as genuine will of increase in the scope of aid to anti-imperialist struggle.

Cool copy-pasta, I appreciate the resource. I did not say China is doing nothing, though, I specifically talked of using soft and especially hard power, and I gave good arguments for it. Wanna address that?

This is an internet forum. There are effortposts about the topic, but not all critique of policy of socialist projects must be a 20-paragraph in a forum format.

If China had provided, say, radars and interceptors to the Iranian military, Iranian lives could have been saved. I’m not even asking for offensive equipment as in “give nukes and dongfengs to Iran”, because of the associated escalation from the west in the economic and diplomatic war against China.

Principled communists in this community often critically support Russia’s military efforts against Ukraine with the main reasons being the net weakening of the currently-dominating western imperialism. Can this analysis not be expanded to China?

Additional well-informed criticism, such as that of Chinese comrade Xiaohongshu, points to the effect of US rapid strikes on anti-imperialist nations in which China economically invests: since Chinese investment is guided by market relations, even comparably small western military action (see 12 day war) can have tremendous effects on Chinese investment in the region due to perceived insecurity by investors.

If your priority during an imperialist war is to put down the biggest anti-imperialist country there is in the world for not being militarily anti-imperialist in exactly the way that you want, you just come out sounding like an imperialist with extra steps

There is a difference doing this in a communist-majority space like hexbear or lemmygrad, where people can make valid criticism and not just “China bad”, and doing this towards the general public. It’s good to have inwards critique constantly, even if it’s not good to let this get into the propaganda war. Seeing as this is a post with 80 upvotes on a minor instance, it’s not the latter but the former.

China’s “do-nothing” approach has been extremely positive since 1991 for their international prospects, but in 2026 the world needs soviet-style interventionism in geopolitics: intelligence and covert missions, usage of soft and hard power, and even military intervention.

Always has been, it’s only that now the violence turns inwards.

God, I wish I were called Soviet Robot too, that sounds pretty fucking epic

Do you think there are no consequences of creating more currency?

I didnt say “create unlimited money”, I said “states have unlimited potential for expenditure in self-denominated currency, and so taxation is not a way of paying for things”. Creating more public deficit has many consequences, both positive and negative depending on where and how this money is invested, but the response to this should be done by economic simulation, not by hard rules and guesswork as we do in most capitalist countries.

How much space should the housing have? How… […] of these questions are fundamentally decentralized in nature

Yes. But first, most people in capitalism do not get the housing they we want where we want it with the services we want it etc, we get housing where we can find and afford it, so capitalism is clearly not a solution to those questions or to decentralization. Chaos is not sinonym with decentralized decision making. Second, socialism has the highest potential for decentralized economic and urban planning. It seems to me that you believe socialism is when the government does things autonomously, but socialism is actually based on grassroots movements and decisions, and cybernetic decentralized planning could easily, massively improve what we have now. Even the old and outdated soviet model is an improvement: everyone could afford housing, which is much more important than rich people having the power to decide how many square meters they get.

Where do people get allocated? Who chooses who gets to have what housing and where?

Any form of decision would be desirable to the current allocation method: chaos based on wealth. An example would be union-owned housing such as the USSR, in which workers got to enjoy housing generally in close proximity to their workplace. Another example would be region-based lotteries with preference for local workers and local inhabitants. Almost anything would be a more fair allocation method than “poor people get fucked over”.

We don’t need to fund anything with taxes, that’s outdated classic economics. Modern monetary theory has proven otherwise. We don’t need taxes to fund things, states can create unlimited amounts of currency, the whole “this is funded by taxes” is simply not true. Taxes work primarily for three purposes: removing money from the economy to prevent inflation, imposing obligations denominated in a certain currency to enforce usage of said currency, and discouraging certain behaviors.

If the whole point of taxing is not to pay for anything, and the whole reason is simply to disincentivize landlordism, georgism simply offers no advantages over collective land ownership and public decisions over land usage. Wanna build housing? Build it. Wanna build schools? Build them. Wanna have a park? Have it. The obsession with taxation is outdated once we’ve found out that taxes aren’t paying for anything and we can have arbitrary amounts of currency created with the purpose of funding whatever projects we collectively decide. In this manner, Georgism is obsolete.

replaced it with state landlordism and political allocation which equally involves rent seeking behavior

False. Housing in the Soviet Union was rented at maintenance cost prices, and on average costed 3% of the monthly income. This is not rent-seeking behaviour.

In both Soviet Union and China land was collectivized, which removed incentives for land use, agricultural output fell and a famine followed

Terrible analysis. The 1930-1933 Soviet famine was caused by economic and productive disadjusting due to the need for extremely fast industrialization, combined with drought and retaliation by landlords. After the initial drive for industrialization, agricultural output rose immensely due to usage of modern agricultural techniques and land reform, and hunger was actually eliminated. The big hunger episode in China was similarly not created by lack of incentive to cultivate the land, but by an ecological catastrophe caused by misguided anti-plague campaigns that eliminated a key part of the ecosystem in a time and society before ecological sciences were developed. Similarly, agricultural output rose rapidly after that and hunger was permanently eliminated. You can compare the exponential rises in life expectancy in the USSR and China after those episodes with similarly developed countries like Brazil or India respectively, and you’ll find that this land reform and industrialization drive saved hundreds of millions of lives.

Scholars have argued this is because economists like John Bates Clark (foundational to the still dominant school of economics: the neoclassical school) was paid by landlord lobby to make “land, capital and labor” into “capital and labor”.

That’s the biggest problem with Georgism. Policy is not something you can apply based on which one is ideologically better theoretically (which I don’t even agree Georgism is), and Georgism, not doing any class analysis, doesn’t provide answer to the most basic question: why would the landlords in power allow us to tax them? And if they don’t, how do we force them?

Socialism having had mass movements and success in expropriating the land from landowners is not a coincidence: since Marx and Engels put forward scientific socialism and Lenin advanced the idea of the vanguard party and of revolutionary tactics, the only revolutions in the world have been socialist.