If it wasn’t collapsing, it wouldn’t be in the red.

They usually say ‘Would you like to join my vanguard party, Stalin’s Angels?’

Seriously, though, I don’t think there’s a way to tell. The number of ‘decolonisers’ that cross picket lines… or the number of ‘Marxists’ who turn out to be post-third gen Frankfurt School… disappointing.

claiming that USSR or current Russia are your friends seems insane

The USSR is gone. It’s not around to be anyone’s friend. This means that communists who talk highly of the USSR are analysing the USSR and concluding that it was the greatest experiment in raising living standards in history. (Maybe that’s now China, but it’s going to be a difficult and possibility incoherent comparison.)

Compare the standard of living before and after the Soviets gained power. Success is the only word for it, even if they’re are valid criticisms. (Do not do that silly thing where you compare life for the average person at any time in the Soviet Union with the life of the most decadent and rich person in the US. That’s not logical.)

I doubt there are many communists who see Russia as a friend. What you see instead are communists acknowledging that Russia is fighting US imperialism. Considering how much death, tragedy, and destruction the US brings and has brought to the world, any work against the US is a net positive for humanity.

(To preclude misunderstanding, no I am not saying that people dying in the Ukraine war is a good thing. Except die hard Nazis. They can get fucked. It’s up to the reader to decide where they think the Nazis are.)

I want to emphasise and follow up something that KiG V2 said:

What these countries do crack down on is when fascists, capitalist opportunists, and foreign intelligence agents work actively to try and destroy, divide, and sabotage them.

Liberals tend to read things like this and say that it is a ‘conspiracy’. But think about it like this: if we know one thing for a fact, it is that “capitalist opportunists, and foreign intelligence agents work[ed] actively to … destroy, divide, and sabotage” the USSR until they won. The capitalists won. They got what they wanted. They got what the communists were saying that the reactionaries wanted all along—the end of the USSR.

Now we have 30 years of evidence of how capitalists would run the regions of the USSR differently. If you can compare what life in the USSR looked like before and after the Soviets gained power, you can also compare what life was like before and after the Soviets lost power.

So what happened after the Berlin wall fell? Can you honestly look at the statistics, the records, the economy, the stories, and say that life got better?

If you can, I’d ask you to look again at all segments of society, not just the lucky few in the middle and upper classes. If you think life got worse after the USSR (it did—living standards plummeted), ask: what changed? You, too, will answer that for all it’s flaws, the change was from socialism to capitalism and that socialism was by far a superior system for the mass of people.

(PS using ‘insane’ as a way of criticising something is ableism.)

dual circulation, BRI, and BRICS.

Have a feeling that this setting up of multiple, overlapping, support networks for Chinese trade and influence is going to go down in history as a masterstroke.

The US also has different networks that support it’s hegemony but they’re interconnected in a different way and ultimately rely on everyone else going what the US says because otherwise the US will otherwise destroy them. That’s no basis for mutual development.

China’s approach could surprise us and fall apart but the recognition of contradiction/antagonism built into the Chinese model hints at it’s longevity.