"Imagine no burger"

The denizens of the Burger Reich never cease to amaze me with their lack of ability to even attempt to understand anything that doesn't specifically and directly affect them as an individual.

Some people really have far too much free time they spend online

I would hope they are full of "tankies" if they claim to be communist. A communist platform without "tankies" is like claiming something to be an ocean despite it having no water.

Was lemmy not originally created by a communist? I feel coming to a website/websites made(possible) by a communist full of communists and then crying about all the tankies is sort of silly even in premise.

Day after day westoid libs and an unfortunate swathe of the western "left" on here and across the internet convince me more and more that the biggest enemy of the global working class is not just the imperial core ruling class but the entire treatlerite people.

They speak with such arrogance on topics they clearly know less than nothing about talking down to us like we're brainwashed bugs incapable of our own thoughts ideas and experiences and in need of the great white saviours who are so superior not only intellectually but morally. It makes me sick.

The average Amerikkkan is such a pathetic sack of shit it's genuinely incredibly impressive how the system was able to completely lobotomize and neuter such an immense portion of the population that they will continue to "but both sides bad" and lick government boots that are actively beating and murdering them and their neighbors.

First: the meta-issue (important)

This post comes off as bad faith and distinctly Western-liberal in outlook. Not because it asks questions, but because it assumes Western liberal norms as the neutral baseline and then judges everything else against them while pretending to be “just asking.”

Repeated patterns:

Treats Western media narratives as default unless proven otherwise, while demanding non-Western states meet impossible purity tests.

Claims to have “researched” but clearly relies on headline-level liberal sources, NGO talking points, and election-observer discourse produced by imperial states.

Frames socialist states as needing to justify themselves morally, while capitalist states are treated as flawed but legitimate.

Uses “authoritarian” as an aesthetic judgment, not a material analysis.

This is not neutral skepticism. It is liberal ideology pretending to be critical thinking.

Now, point by point.

“Things I have been told”

1. “Chinese sources about Chinese elections being democratic are like American sources saying America is good”

False equivalence.

US elections are dominated by private money, lobbying, media monopolies, and elite candidate filtration.

China does not define democracy as periodic multi-party spectacle. It defines it as mass participation, cadre accountability, and material outcomes.

Chinese elections operate through people’s congresses, where local representatives are elected and then elevated based on performance, supervision, and recall mechanisms.

You are judging Chinese democracy by liberal electoral aesthetics, not by whether the masses can influence governance.

2. “Venezuela’s election wasn’t legit”

Assertion without evidence.

Venezuela has more elections, more parties, and more audits than most Western states.

Their electoral system includes paper trails, audits, international observers, and machine verification.

Western claims of fraud emerge only when US-aligned candidates lose.

If your evidence is “Western media said so,” that is not analysis.

3. “I’m too propagandized by the West”

Likely true.

Westerners are immersed in:

Corporate media

NGO narratives aligned with foreign policy

“Human rights” discourse weaponized selectively

Read Parenti’s Inventing Reality. Western propaganda works precisely because it claims not to exist.

4. “Any protests are CIA-made”

Strawman.

No serious Marxist claims all protests are CIA. The claim is:

The CIA funds, steers, amplifies, and weaponizes protests where it serves imperial interests.

This is documented fact (Iran 1953, Chile 1973, Hong Kong, Ukraine, Venezuela, etc.).

Rejecting this is historical illiteracy.

5. “Democracy is a bourgeois invention”

Incorrect framing.

Liberal democracy is a bourgeois invention.

Proletarian democracy means democratic control over production, the state, and society.

Voting every few years for capitalist managers is not democracy.

6. “Ukraine is full of Nazis / Russia threatened by NATO”

Factually true, whether you like it or not.

Ukraine has institutionalized fascist formations (Azov, Aidar, Right Sector).

Bandera collaborators are state-celebrated.

NATO expanded eastward explicitly against Russian security assurances.

This does not make Russia socialist or morally pure. It makes Western narratives dishonest.

7. “EU is bourgeois and should be dissolved”

Correct.

The EU is:

A neoliberal treaty structure

Enforces austerity, privatization, and capital mobility

Suppresses popular sovereignty (see Greece, Italy)

That Elon Musk says something similar is irrelevant. Class analysis does not depend on who accidentally agrees.

8. “All states are authoritarian”

Yes, materially.

The question is authoritarian for whom.

Capitalist states repress workers and protect capital.

Socialist states repress bourgeois power and imperial subversion.

Pretending Spain or France are “less authoritarian” ignores:

Police violence

Anti-strike laws

Surveillance

Repression of migrants

9. “Authoritarianism is just an insult against socialist states”

Often true.

Liberals use it as a moral label, not an analytic category. No material analysis follows.

10. “Freedom of the press is bourgeois”

Yes.

Press freedom exists only for owners.

Journalists do not decide narratives; advertisers, owners, and state interests do.

Whistleblowers (Assange, Manning) show the limits clearly.

11. “LGBT and racism are irrelevant”

This is reactionary nonsense (often nazbol garbage).

Correct Marxist position:

Oppression is material and real

It must be analyzed through class, not liberal identity fetishism

Ignoring it alienates the masses

12. “Collective good over individual rights”

This is where liberalism fully collapses.

Under capitalism:

“Individual rights” protect property and capital.

Under socialism:

Rights are material guarantees (housing, healthcare, education).

Unlimited “personal freedom” for exploiters is incompatible with emancipation.

No society prioritizes all individual desires. Liberalism just hides whose desires matter.

“Things I have observed”

1. Chinese elections resemble fascist Italy

This is historically ignorant.

Fascism:

Preserved private capital

Crushed unions

Served monopoly interests

China:

Executes corrupt capitalists

Controls capital flows

Plans development

Eliminated extreme poverty

Superficial form ≠ class content.

2. North Korean elections are fake

You admit:

You rely on Western sources

NK is hyper-isolated

So you know nothing reliable.

Western media has lied consistently about:

Haircuts

Executions

Daily life

Serious Marxists suspend judgment where evidence is contaminated or non existent.

3. Venezuela rigged elections

Again: assertion without sources.

Western NGOs ≠ neutral observers.

4. Oppression justified in socialist states but criticized in capitalist ones

Correct, and this is not hypocrisy.

Class oppression is not morally neutral. Oppressing exploiters ≠ oppressing exploited.

5. State owns production but people don’t own state

This ignores:

Class character of the state

Mass line

Party–mass integration

Read Lenin. Read Mao. The state is not a metaphysical entity.

6. There are billionaires in China

Yes. And this is not a secret.

They exist because:

Market reforms were necessary to survive imperialist encirclement

Capital is subordinate to the state

Billionaires are routinely jailed, exiled, or executed

Capital exists on a leash, unlike in the West, where it rules.

7. Sweatshops in China

Industrialization under global capitalism is not optional.

China:

Used export manufacturing to build productive forces

Lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty

Is now reshoring, automating, and repressing capital

You are judging a process as if it were an end state.

Final diagnosis

This post reflects:

Liberal moralism

Western arrogance

Shallow “research”

Fear of committing to class analysis

It is easier to say:

“Everyone is lying, therefore I remain skeptical”

than to accept that:

Imperial propaganda is systematic

Socialist states operate under siege

Democracy is class-based, not aesthetic

If you genuinely want answers:

Read Lenin (State and Revolution)

Read Mao (On Practice, On the Correct Handling of Contradictions)

Read Parenti

Drop the assumption that Western liberalism is neutral

Right now, the posture is not critical. It is comfortable disbelief dressed up as skepticism. You come off as an arrogant, well-off Western liberal content with social-democratic stability while the periphery is super-exploited by the largest immiseration machine in human history so you can keep your treats. A treatlerite.

You’re arguing against a position I’m not taking. I’m not dismissing people’s suffering, courage, or risk; I’m rejecting the idea that suffering itself constitutes a challenge to power, or even a protest in any meaningful sense. Repression is not the same thing as leverage. Western protests don’t “fail” in some tragic way, they’re never structured to succeed in the first place: no durable mass organization, no discipline, no concrete enforceable demands, no escalation strategy, and crucially no mechanism that makes the state fear consequences if it ignores them. Being beaten by cops inside a ritualized protest cycle the state fully understands and contains doesn’t change that. And yes, from the perspective of the periphery, it’s hard to summon much sympathy when citizens of the core (whose governments operate the largest immiseration apparatus in human history, grinding the periphery nonstop, 24/7 365, with the ultimate orphan-crushing machine) can’t even mount protests that make the slightest material difference. That’s not arrogance or moral contempt; it’s a material critique of a protest culture designed as a pressure-release valve for the empire, not a threat to it, elevated in the West to near-biblical canon where peaceful, state-sanctioned parades are treated as the only legitimate form of politics outside of the ballot box.

Yes? Repression alone doesn’t turn something into a real challenge to power. Liberal states routinely brutalize protests they know will remain contained. In 2020 millions marched, chanted, got beaten, posted photos, then went home and the system carried on largely unchanged: police power intact, imperial violence ongoing, no serious threat to state authority. That’s why much of the world sees Western “protests” as angry parades: emotionally intense, sometimes violently policed, but structurally safe. They function less as challenges to power and more as pressure-release valves for discontent that the system knows how to absorb and move past.

Not to be mean but much of the world doesn't really see American or really western "protests" as protests they're more like angry parades

Posadist Empanada era incoming

The North American left is not merely ineffective; it has been structurally neutralized and largely complicit. This is the population most directly sustained by imperial extraction, and it shows. Political activity has been reduced to NGO choreography, permitted marches, and aesthetic outrage that never threatens power. What they call “protest” is often just a safety valve for the system they claim to oppose, angry parades so to speak. Unlike even other imperial-core societies, North America sits at the command center. There is no occupation, no imposed austerity from above, no external pressure forcing confrontation. As a result, the left there has lost even the basic capacity to disrupt. Risk, discipline, and organization have been replaced by moral performance, social capital accumulation, and endless denunciation—while the material machinery of domination continues uninterrupted. From the periphery, this looks obscene. Entire societies are immiserated, destabilized, or destroyed to maintain this system, while those closest to the lever of power treat politics as a lifestyle. The issue is not repression alone; it is that large sections of the “left” are materially invested in stability, whether through labor privileges, NGOs, or proximity to empire. Real struggle would threaten their position, so it never materializes. This is why your comparisons fail. Elsewhere, even under worse conditions, left movements have had to contend with survival, sovereignty, and direct coercion. In North America, the left has been absorbed, declawed, and turned inward. What remains is not a revolutionary force but a managed constituency: loud, angry, and ultimately harmless.