Mean…

Pick up that can 😎

Great! It’s evenore useful online when users frequently don’t list their pronouns.

It is both, it’s “yes” and “YES.” As a Marxist, I often use comrade not for the LARP but more often for the gender-neutral utility.

I have an “immediate backlog” of 5 games, about 30 in my “primary backlog,” and about 60 in my “backlog.” I promote or demote based on vibe and try to play 1 game at a time. I also have a tight curation of favorites and Steam Deck bangers.

Oh, it’s the map they always use

That’s actually wrong. Marx came up with it, he just called what Lenin called “Socialism” as “lower-stage Communism.” The origin is in Historical Materialism, and the concept of Scientific Socialism (as opposed to the Utopian form that thought you could just think up a good society and create it outright).

Calling it a “continuum” is misleading. Capitalism, as an example, starts with many smaller Capitalists but eventually concentrates and monopolizes. This is a trackable and historical motion, not a “continuum” but nonetheless an observed trend. Socialism, on the other hand, continues that movement but does so in the direction of collectivization, as public ownership and planning not only becomes feasible but far more efficient at higher levels of development, which is also observable and trackable.

Communism is when this process has been done and all private property has been folded into the public sector. This isn’t a straight and narrow line, but a process that will happen in many different manners across many different countries, but by tracking trajectories and behaviors this prediction becomes clearer and clearer, and Marx becomes vindicated by the passage of time as we observe them coming to fruition.

No economy is “pure,” what determines if an economy is Capitalist or Socialist is what is primary. Trying to say that Capitalism or Socialism describes a specific section of an economy results in issues like drawing hard lines where they shouldn’t and can’t be drawn.

Those are social programs. Socialism and Capitalism are systems overall, the presence of the post office in the US does not alter that character.

“Market Socialism,” if you mean the PRC’s Socialist Market Economy, is founded on Marxism. They maintain that they are working towards Communism and are working with a Marxian understanding of the economy. This isn’t about “purity,” rather, this is Marxist and is working towards Communism, so it’s a Communist ideology.

As for mixed economies, such a naming distinction is rather pointless. All economies are mixed, there exists no economy that does not have characteristics of the previous mode of production or the next. Whether a system is Capitalist or Socialist is determinate on what is primary in an economy, not what is “pure.”

Further still, no system is stagnant, competition forces centralization, so Market Socialism eventually works towards either a resurgance of Capitalism or progression to Communism.

I think “socialistic injections” is a misnomer. Capitalism and Socialism are descriptors for entire economies, not parts of them. Generally, reading theory tends to help people support moving towards Socialism.

Socialism is generally a form of society where public ownership and collectivization is the driving force of the economy. Communism is when that process is complete. There are various different forms and characteristics Socialism takes, but they all exist in motion and thus will either move on to Communism or revert to Capitalism. To call Communism a type of Socialism would be to call Capitalism a type of Feudalism, just because both have property owners, but this of course is not a good form of analysis.

I understand that you aren’t a Marxist-Leninist. I am, sure, but again I made the very clear case that the overwhelming majority of Leftism worldwide and historically has fallen under the categories of Marxism, which is without fail Communist, or Anarchist. These aren’t necessarily ML specific points of view, if you can point to major non-Marxist, non-Anarchist strains of Leftist practice that have any major relevance, then I can concede.

As for Leftists that don’t ascribe to labels, I don’t really care about what one individual is thinking, because I am not trying to prepare them for random internet leftist #18948 with their own specific eccentricities. I am talking in extremely broad and relevant distinctions, like what has actually existed and continues to exist.

Mercantilism is not distinct from Capitalism, but a form of it.

The person we are replying to is someone who wanted the absolute basics. Getting into the nuances of minor Syndicalist movements, the historical Utopian Socialists like Saint-Simon, or other forms really isn’t relevant unless you want to dig deeper.

Historically, the 2 largest and most significant strands of Leftist thinking and practice have been Marxist and Anarchist, and there are no non-Communist Marxists. I mean this absolutely, 99.9% of existing leftism has been either Marxist or Anarchist. They don’t need to understand the subtle differences in Yugoslavian Marxism or Russian or Chinese or Cuban, because they all are forms of Marxism.

Further still, again, Communism comes after Socialism. It isn’t a form of Socialism.

National liberation against settler-colonial genocide is a good thing.

I’d be thrilled, genuinely.

Great!

Why bother engaging in impossible hypotheticals?

I never said that China doesn’t do narrative twisting. I am telling you that by relying on YouTube and Wikipedia you are deliberately only hearing one side and can’t actually know anything for certain.

The thing is, you don’t listen to the CIA directly. You listen to the New York Times, Radio Free Asia, etc who are paid by the CIA to report in the way you do. It isn’t intentional listening to the CIA, but happens regardless. Parenti’s Inventing Reality is a great resource on this.

As for Tian’anmen, it isn’t nitpicky at all. If we accept the common Western narrative, there were 10,000 students rolled over by tanks on the square as peaceful protestors. If we accept the PRC’s narrative, there was a month long protest that eventually attracted US support, until eventually protestors lynched unarmed PLA officers, prompting sending in tanks and hundreds of deaths in total. Such a mischaracterization perists to make the US’ adversaries look bad, while the thousands killed by South Korean dictators in the Gwang-Ju Massacre around the same time are unheard of. Why? Why this double standard? Because the US wants you to know about some things and not others.

As for dismissing all western reporting on the USSR, I don’t. Blackshirts and Reds is a critical look at the USSR by an American that isn’t even a Marxist, just sympathetic to working class movements.

The “diversity” in thought in Western Nations does not blunt the dominance of narrative. The fact that true information exists and is accessible, as I have been linking, does not mean that the dominant narrative isn’t selected for via specific funding and popularization. Figures like Orwell and Chomsky that are aesthetically left but denounce Socialists and Socialist movements are deliberately taught in schooling because of this. Endless interviews to coopt leftist movements. Actual, genuine challenges are usually erased, like author Domenico Losurdo or Michael Parenti.