The absolute state of the discourse on this board lately is pathetic. It’s almost 2026 and I’m still seeing "socialists" parroting CIA talking points like they’re reading from the Black Book of Communism. It’s time to filter the radlibs and the ultras who care more about moral purity than winning.
If we actually apply historical materialism instead of utopian wish-casting, it becomes obvious that Stalin and Deng aren't just "good" – they are the two greatest practitioners of Marxism in history because they did what Western leftists refuse to do: they prioritized the survival of the revolution over the approval of the bourgeoisie.
1. Stalin: The Shield
Stop crying about "authoritarianism" and read Losurdo. His Critique of a Black Legend completely exposes how the "millions dead" narrative is just recycled Nazi war propaganda that the West adopted during the Cold War. The "Holodomor" wasn't a genocide; it was a combination of kulak sabotage and cyclical drought that the Soviets eventually ended through collectivization. Stalin understood that you don't survive capitalist encirclement with good vibes. He took a country of wooden plows and turned it into a nuclear superpower in a single generation. He purged the fifth columnists because he knew a war of annihilation was coming. Without that "authoritarianism," the Wehrmacht would have wiped the Slavs off the map.
2. Deng: The Sword
The hate for Deng is even more embarrassing. You guys claim to care about the poor but hate the man who oversaw the greatest poverty alleviation program in human history? Deng understood that "poverty is not socialism." He developed the productive forces necessary to compete with the West. And regarding 1989: He saved China from the fate of the USSR. Tiananmen was a textbook color revolution, backed by Western NGOs and intelligence. Deng saw Gorbachev selling out to Pizza Hut and realized that sometimes you have to crush a counter-revolution to preserve the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Because he had the spine to do that, China is now mogging the US economy while Russia spent the 90s getting looted by oligarchs.
TL;DR
Parenti said it best in Blackshirts and Reds: you people want a revolution without a revolution. You want a clean, safe process that never makes mistakes and never exercises power. That doesn't exist. Stalin secured the state; Deng secured the economy. If you reject them, you’re not a revolutionary – you’re just an idealist waiting to lose.
237 posts and 45 image replies omitted.>>2628151>anarchism flagokay, so true bro. You are being unironic
>>2628002>yeah im sure china will re implement … workers control of MOPwhen did they have that? i think they have to build mops first before they can give them to woerkrs
>>2628074>Opposition to country X doing imperialism does NOT equate to support for country Y doing imperialism. of course not the contention is over whether country Y (when underdeveloped, periphery, colony, oppressed, resource exporter, dependency, etc) is imperialist at all
>>2627935>internationalism doesn't work kill yourself my man
>>2628316<internationalism is when you arm random minority sects that call themselves communist so they can lose civil wars because they have no mass support>implying communists can only lose no matter what support they get from foreign powers kill yourself my man
>>2628410no im implying the ussr mistakenly armed states that were communist in name only that later betrayed the revolution when the americans offered more givas
>>2628410unless the country they're in is losing a war and joining them becomes a necessity for the population to not starve,yes. (litterally all of the actual revolutions that won)
Mercantilist Keynesianism isn't socialism.
>No dude, chinese workers making tons of funko-pops is true socialism! Muh productive forces bro!
Pathetic, as for Stalin, you should already know why worshipping Stalin is fucking idiotic, so won't even bother
>>2628556the bordigist worshipper accuses the stalin admirer of Stalin-worship
>>2627958Tbh yeah in context it wasn't so bad; But the sheer name-calling and sectarianism of many stalinists is what makes this funny.
Like they will accuse certain figures of being fascist or bourgeois agents for false and obscure reasons while Stalin literally shook hands with Nazis.
>le fifth columnists
This is one of my least favorite stalinist memes. I'm supposed to believe every Old Bolshevik who risked their lives overthrowing the government and fighting a civil war for socialism, except coincidentally the ones that sided with the central stalinist faction were actually evil nazi spies who would hand the country over to the Germans even though the Stalin admin traded and collaborated with Germany right until the Germans predictably invaded btw. I understand the spirit of the post and agree that a revolution can't be waged without government and difficult decisions but you have to be braindead to believe that all of the opposition to Stalin within and outside of the party were just bad guys who needed to be killed or gulaged.
>>2628686Even Parenti called Stalin's purge of Old Bolsheviks a crime against reason and socialism.
>>2628721He said that before Furr's books on Trotsky.
>>2628686I wish I can understand why is it so easy to believe in such a grand conspiracy that dedicated revolutionaries who spent years even decades in exile or prison all eventually conspired with fascism against the USSR instead of the possibility that Stalin was just corrupt and paranoid. especially given how obviously fabricated the evidence was and that most were later rehabilitated, Not to mention how many purges later backfired spectacularly.
I have this childish hope that when I understand this I at least can see where they're coming from and try to reason with them. No. It's just the same stubborn clinging that religious fanatics have. Stalinism is brainrot.
It's like he has a magic on others.
Stalin would have shot your for supporting deng which was a right opportunist and capitalist roader
>>2628726>Grover FurrGive me a fuckin break. He's a cultist, uses poor sources (almost exclusively records from the state and party) and it seems like an annoying professor.
If you want a lark:
https://www.ratemyprofessors.com/professor/23883 >>2628774The state and party sources are the best sources. How more primary can you get?
>>2628155when they run out of arguments they start pretending to be you and using bad arguments. notice!
>>2628686>the Stalin admin traded and collaborated with Germany right until the Germans predictably invaded actually the USSR throughout the 30s tried to build an anti fascist coalition with the europeans but they were too busy appeasing hitler and signing non aggression pacts. the soviets were the LAST not the FIRST to sign a non aggression pact, and when they finally did, they did it explicitly to buy time and move their factories east out of the range of the luftwaffe. in hindsight it was a bad strategy because nazis never intended to honor the agreement, but it was also a final desperate strategy after everything else had failed.
>>2628777>How more primary can you get?slightly off topic but I find it very TELLING that wikipedia disallows primary sources. you're not allowed to consult history directly. something only becomes "true" once enough western academics writing "secondary" sources "agree with" and "repeat" the primary sources. The entire game of source citation is rigged when it comes to historiography.
>>2628933History and fate fucked the ussr over. There is nothing ussr could have done to oppose the flow of history
>>2628771babby's first impression of deng.
>>2628771>a right opportunist and capitalist roaderultras-lefts always call strategic realpolitik "right opportunism" and opportunists always call principled adherence to marxism leninism "ultra-left deviations".
So who's correct? The outcomes of a historical "experiment" determines whether a particular strategy was the correct strategy. But even then, a "correct strategy" is not permanently correct, but merely correct under the particular material conditions it was employed. The time/place/etc… Communist strategy stresses extreme sensitivity to context. Because of this extreme sensitivity to context, it is very easy for Communists to become narcissists over small difference, purging and murdering one another not over real differences in ideological loyalty, but over differences in short term strategy, which in certain historical bottlenecks appear to be more important than anything else: How did Deng Xiaoping respond to being called a "Capitalist Roader?"
>Then in 1966 came the “cultural revolution”, which lasted a whole decade, a real disaster for China. During that period many veteran cadres suffered persecution, including me. I was labelled the "No. 2 Capitalist Roader" after Liu Shaoqi. Liu was called "commander-in-chief of the bourgeois headquarters" and I "deputy commander- in-chief". Many strange things happened in those days. For instance, people were told that they should be content with poverty and backwardness and that it was better to be poor under socialism and communism than to be rich under capitalism. That was the sort of rubbish peddled by the Gang of Four. There is no such thing as socialism and communism with poverty. The ideal of Marxists is to realize communism. According to Marx, communist society is a society in which the principle of from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs is applied. What is the principle of to each according to his needs? How can we apply this principle without highly developed productive forces and vast material wealth? According to Marxism, communist society is a society in which there is overwhelming material abundance. Socialism is the first stage of communism; it means expanding the productive forces, and it represents a long historical period. Only if we constantly expand the productive forces can we finally achieve communism. The Gang of Four's absurd theory of socialism and communism led only to poverty and stagnation. […] Certain individuals, pretending to support the reform and the open policy, call for wholesale Westernization of China in an attempt to lead the country towards capitalism. These people don't really support our policies; they are only trying vainly to change the nature of our society. If China were totally Westernized and went capitalist, it would be absolutely impossible for us to modernize. The problem we have to solve is how to enable our one billion people to cast off poverty and become prosperous. If we adopted the capitalist system in China, probably a small number of people would be enriched, while the overwhelming majority would remain in a permanent state of poverty. If that happened, there would be a revolution in China. China's modernization can be achieved only through socialism, not capitalism. There have been people who have tried to introduce capitalism into China, and they have always failed. -Deng Xiaoping,
We shall draw on historical experience and guard against wrong tendencies, April 30, 1987
>>2628006>Now do 19th century UK vs US and really blow all the dumb marxists away, airheadWhat should impress you is not merely the trade statistics, but that China won all those trade partners in an era where the normal strategy for washington was to strangle socialists with sanctions and embargoes, overthrow them with coups, bomb them to smithereens, occupy them, install comprador bourgeoisie, and force IMF loans. To avoid this fate is remarkable.
Luxemburg, Pannekoek and Bordiga would each have seizures if they read this thread…
>>2629216lenin, stalin and even bukharin would do the same
ᴉuᴉlossnW would be in love tho >>2628686demcent is really easy just accept the majority vote and dont be a wrecker
>>2628979<Lenin:a. How long did the NEP last?
b. What did Lenin say about the burgeoning bureaucracy and about it wielding something?
<Mao: a. While the CPC under Mao's leadership (the pupils of the just successful anti-fascist USSR, collectivized, industrialized, centrally planned, before supercomputers) focused on both social and material conditions, what did Mao think Deng's perspective lacked and the consequences of downplaying one?
b. According to the CPC during 1950s-to-1960s, what are the adverse consequences to socialist internationalism by adopting a rightist and social-imperialist line, first emerging in the CPSU with Khrushchev's clique, then also being struggled against in the PRC?
c. Why was the Cultural Revolution started?
d. What are some of Mao's final statements on Deng near the end of Mao's life?
e. What differentiates Chinese foreign policy from the 50s to mid 70s vs late 70s to today?
<Xi:a. If the CPC several years under the leadership of Xi Jinping in 2017 tried to strip the DPRK of its main method of defending itself, nuclear armaments, in chorus with the G7/NATO imperialists; what in US-China relations changed in 2018 that made China less interested? And does that reflect a deeply set bourgeois (profit motive, competing capitals) vs proletarian (revolutionary, socialist) internationalism guiding their overall strategy?
>>2616182>noooo pleeeeeaaaase dont make a cult of personality out of me, i have no choice but to obey uwu.Stalin is a whole lot more comprehensible if you accept the following:
>Stalin was a narcissist>Narcissism: A personality disorder that causes self aggrandizing, intolerance for disagreement, paranoia about conspiracies against you, but is not the same as psychopathy, meaning narcissistic individuals can still hold ideals and empathy.Him periods of purging all those who opposed him, being easily impressed by opportunist yes men, the personality cult, absurd unempathetic decisions rooted in paranoia, yet still fighting for ideals of communism.
Of the few communists that actually bother to critically think about their own beliefs, 99% go through bouts of being a Grover Furr level apologist for Stalin, swallowing Stalins own narrative wholesale, then rapidly switching over to the other end, calling him the great Satan and disavowing everything he ever laid his eyes on, then back and forth between those postions. It isn't until they've actually read a lot and grown up emotionally that they realize that like all communists, there are many aspects he had that were great and many that were bad.
>>2628979Only good pro Deng post i've ever seen on this website.
>>2640799that's too fair to mamdani
>>2640895Maybe stop arguing in terms of claims about what things are not, and start saying what they are instead. Because this is just a confusion tactic aimed to making it seem as if the current Chinese economic model and the post NEP Soviet economic model are at all similar.
>>2640790its not paranoia if your enemies are actually arming and training former ss and dirlwinger brigaders to parachute hundreds of kilometers into your country to assassinate random civilians and blow up factories for a whole decade after the war is over
>>2640906of course they're not similar. one is dead and the other thrives
A CIA talking point just flew over my house
>>2615779>You guys claim to care about the poor but hate the man who oversaw the greatest poverty alleviation program in human historyUncritical support for comrades FDR and LBJ
>>2647795And ᴉuᴉlossnW. And maybe hitler
>>2646146For which class?
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