First of all, don't start by assuming there is anything to refute - never accept the premise of an anti-communist argument without investigating whether it's actually true! Does China really have billionaires in the ranks of the party or is that just a myth that has been popularized to try and discredit the CPC in the eyes of gullible western leftists with ultra tendencies? If they do then how many and in what positions? What is the proportion of capitalists to non-capitalists in the party, and more importantly how much actual influence and power do they really have?

Do not simply accept the framing of these sorts of "gotchas", you must always dig deeper and investigate beyond the cliche phrases and surface appearances instead looking into the actual dialectical conditions that exist. Whether or not individual capitalist elements exist in the ranks of the party says nothing about the fundamental class character of the party itself. If the party was supposedly taken over by revisionist and bourgeois forces how is it that the way the Chinese state and economy are run and the results that their system produces are still so radically different from what we see in Western capitalist systems? If the same class is supposedly in power why are they not experiencing the same social and economic dynamics? If the CPC is so revisionist why has it not liberalized the country into the ground and abolished itself like the CPSU did once it was hijacked by revisionists?

And bear in mind that what happened in the USSR happened despite there technically being no capitalists whatsoever in their ruling party right up until that party voluntarily totally disempowered itself and dissolved the dictatorship of the proletariat handing the country to the enemies of the working class on a silver platter.

Clearly one must look not just at the composition (though that also matters) but at the guiding ideology and the dominant political line within the party, in addition to how the party is organized and how it governs in practice.

Not zero, that would be absurd, but much less than Ukraine. There is a very simple rule of thumb for estimating casualty ratios in such conflicts, and that is they are directly proportional to the artillery overmatch since most casualties in conventional modern conflicts are inflicted by artillery fire. Ukraine has been stockpiling their best equipment and munitions which they received from the West for this offensive, and as a result they are managing to shoot a fair number of shells and missiles in order to try and soften up the Russian lines, but Russia still has an overwhelming advantage. In addition Russia also has almost uncontested air dominance at the moment which further skews the ratio in their favor.

Big "how do you do, fellow leftists" vibe from that comment. I mean what's more leftist than repeating CIA propaganda about a failed color revolution attempt?

Anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism are a must. You can be either without being Marxist but you can't be Marxist without being both. In addition the world view of a Marxist must be informed by dialectical materialism.

The last two questions seem redundant. They just rehash things asked in previous questions. Also the race category "white" is a very American way of putting it. Europeans don't tend to identify as "white" but as either generally European (perhaps adding Eastern, Western, Southern or Northern), or by specifying a particular nationality/ethnic group. In fact the whole race question seems honestly odd as a European, those categories are not typically used here, it's more common to specify nationality and religion than "race".

I think this mostly sums it up:

Yeah the pros and cons are pretty simple: Pro: He's not a Democrat or a Republican; Con: He's not a Democrat or a Republican so he stands literally no chance of winning

Still the point of third party candidates running isn't necessarily to win it's to scare one of the two main parties that the third party candidate will siphon off just enough of their votes that it will cost them the victory. Because of this potential for vote splitting third party candidates can sometimes use their platform to apply pressure to the the mainstream candidates to abandon some unpopular policies and adopt some popular ones to win back votes.

This is the theory at least. In practice this turns out to not actually work that way because politicians once elected don't give a single shit about anything they promised in their campaign, instead they just do whatever the big money interests tell them to. Also it's pretty much common knowledge that both Democrats and Republicans alike would rather lose to the other party than give even a single crumb to the people. After all, they are not really two opposing political parties but two sides of the same corporate uniparty. Whichever one wins, you lose.

Not to mention that elected representatives really don't have that much power to meaningfully change the big policy directions of the US anyway. The real power is in the hands of the permanent security state, the intelligence agencies and other tentacles of the deep state apparatus, as well as the military industrial complex and the corporate-financial oligarchy. If politicians try to go against the interests of these groups who actually rule the country everything they try to do will be obstructed after which at best they find their political careers ruined, and if that isn't an option they get a bullet to the back of the head.

The thing with western arms production is that the fundamental model hasn't changed, it's a privatized neoliberal profit driven one and as such there are inherent limitations to how much and how fast the production rates can be increased no matter how much political will there exists to ramp things up.

They are incapable of competing with the war industrial capacity of Russia let alone China and they are incapable of changing this because they cannot change their hyper-financialized economic model.

One of the things i really appreciate about ML spaces is the ability to address controversial subjects and not be immediately shut down for it in the way it happens in liberal and ultra spaces. And if someone is egregiously wrong but is engaging in an honest fashion and not just trying to troll there are always comrades who are ready and willing to educate them and explain exactly how and why they are wrong.

Sometimes this takes a lot of effort, and it can become tiresome and we always have to remain cognizant that getting communists to waste their time having to explain the same thing over and over again is a wrecker tactic, so it may be necessary on occasion in the interest of saving time to simply point people in the direction of sources they can go to learn more.

But on the whole i find that we can generally tell when someone is engaging in good faith and we are willing to discuss and explain. I don't find the same willingness in ultra-left spaces to engage with arguments and do the work of investigating what the actual facts are. Reality is messy and complex and not always so black and white as they prefer to pretend.

Instead ultras adopt the liberal preference for simple, well-established narratives that are considered true by virtue of being repeated often enough, and of course the prioritizing of moralistic idealism and ideological purity over actual materialist analysis and engaging with the real world as it exists not as we may wish it.

Russia are not the aggressors, NATO and its Nazi proxies are. Russia did not invade Ukraine, NATO did in 2014 when it overthrew the legitimate government of Ukraine and installed a bunch of criminal fascist thugs into power causing a civil war to break out when eastern Ukrainians who were opposed to the Maidan coup stood up to defend their homes and their families. Russia tried everything it could to resolve the situation diplomatically for eight years while NATO continued to arm the Nazis in preparation for war with Russia. Eventually Russia was left no choice but to intervene to protect the Donbass republics from the genocidal Kiev regime when it became clear that the proxy army that NATO had built was about to launch an all out attack on the Donbass with the intent to commit a bloodbath and ethnic cleansing in the style of what NATO helped do to Serbian Krajina in 1995.

Literally every one of your premises is false. It is not a "war of aggression" and while we obviously do not support Putin, for a variety of reasons, the main ones being that he is an anti-communist, a liberal and he encourages reactionary social tendencies, he is also none of the things you described him as.

It is hard to believe that this is not a troll post when in the span of a few sentences you managed to regurgitate such a high number of western imperialist propaganda talking points and repeated a half dozen of the silly names they call Putin to demonize him: "oligarch", "richest man in the world", "warlord", "megalomanial" [sic], "autocrat fascist" and "tyrant". But i'll give you the benefit of the doubt and explain.

Let's start from the top: firstly, there are oligarchs in Russia with close ties to the government but Putin himself is not an oligarch. You may want to look up the definition of the term if you are confused. In Russia the oligarchs are primarily those opportunistic capitalists who after the fall of the USSR managed to amass great wealth and economic-political power by gaining ownership over a significant portion of the old state industries. Putin was not among them. Putin was a bureaucrat first and then a career politician.

Secondly, there is not a single shred of evidence for the liberal media concocted myth that he is "the richest man in the world". These allegations have never been substantiated by anything factual. They are based solely on the argument that "well, the Russian state owns X property and Putin controls the state, therefore Putin owns all of X". It is nonsense.

Further, calling him a "warlord" is just silly, i shouldn't even have to explain why. He does not lead a military government, he is an elected president and head of state of a civilian government. Whether or not his election was or was not legitimately democratic (by whichever measure we want to judge that) is beside the point. Like all elections in bourgeois democracies Russian elections underrepresent the working class and favor the interests of the bourgeoisie. But he is no less legitimate than any western elected official,

In fact it could be argued he has more legitimacy than most of his western counterparts as even western conducted polls that are biased against him show that his popularity is genuinely quite high. As communists we understand that this does not change the class character of his bourgeois government but it shows that many people in Russia at least in part associate the recovery that Russia has experienced since the disastrous 1990s with Putin's governance.

As for "autocrat" that depends on whether you consider the executive powers of a president inherently autocratic. That would make the US or French presidents also autocrats. However this is a meaningless accusation anyway and unbecoming of a socialist because if Putin is an autocrat then so was and is every leader of any socialist state. Liberals accuse any leader they dislike of being an "autocrat".

So let's simplify the discussion and look at the literal definition of "autocrat" as meaning a sole ruler with absolute power. Doing even cursory investigation of how the Russian government works we find it simply does not apply. Putin does not have unchecked autocratic power, he is checked by the Russian parliament and a number of various other governing bodies of the Russian Federation. The decision making is very much collaborative and involves a whole strata of political elites. The problem is that as in all bourgeois democracies these governing bodies and elites represent and advance the interests of the bourgeoisie first and foremost.

As for whether or not he is a fascist this opens up a whole discussion about what fascism actually is. Is social democracy just social fascism? Many leftists would also argue that the US is and has been fascist since its inception, if not towards everyone to begin with then at least toward black and indigenous people. Where even is the difference between fascism and the regular dictatorship of the bourgeoisie that we have in every capitalist country?

However if we assume for the sake of this discussion that the western liberal bourgeois democracies are not what we mean when we say fascist then neither is Russia. Russia is not in any qualitative or quantitative way more authoritarian or reactionary than the US, and in many ways it is less so. And no, fascism is not simply when people have reactionary tendencies. Otherwise most of the world would be full of fascists.

Of course we can never know what someone truly believes but at least overtly Putin himself does not seem to be ideologically fascist. He can be best described as a moderate nationalist liberal. There are people and groups in Russia with legitimately fascist ideology and the centrist Putin government sometimes flirts with them but on the whole it seems to want to keep them marginalized. Russia is a multi-ethnic, multi-religious state, if a real fascist, ultra-nationalist political movement was to gain traction Russia would almost certainly devolve into internal chaos. It is not in the interests of the Russian bourgeoisie to allow that.

And as of late fascist ideology has become even more unpopular in Russia as they are at war with an actually fascist state. A state that openly worships Nazi collaborators as its national heroes, which has adopted fascist slogans and a racist, genocidal, fascist ideology, and whose soldiers are covered in Nazi insignia. A large number of Russian neonazis have gone over to the side of Ukraine and are now fighting against Russia.

Finally, calling Putin a "tyrant" is just a repeat of the accusation of being an autocrat which is simply not factual. All of these cliche expressions you have used that are lifted straight out of western media's anti-Russian propaganda are essentially rehashings of the old racist "oriental despotism" trope. As communists must understand our class enemies and to understand what they are and what they are not. And Putin is many things we dislike and oppose but he is not the caricature that the West paints him as.

Enough about Putin, on to the war itself. The claim that it was started solely by Putin for "megalomanial" reasons is simply infantile. Not only is it embarrassing and unserious to engage in this sort of individualizing, psycho-pathologizing of complex geopolitical conflicts, it is evidence of either intent of deception or catastrophic ignorance. Conflicts between nations do not start because one person felt like starting a war. They are the result of complex processes and contradictions, often having built up for a long time.

This conflict did not start in 2022, it started at least as far back as 2014. I won't repeat the history, you can read about it elsewhere, but suffice to say there was already a conflict happening way before Russia intervened. And Russia intervened because it was left no other choice. Not only was the expansion of NATO into the now fascist state of Ukraine becoming an existential threat, but the ethnically Russian Donbass region of Ukraine, which in 2014 rebelled against the US orchestrated fascist coup d'etat, had come under serious threat of being attacked and overrun by the spring of 2022. No Russian government could have stood by and allowed this.

Putin himself in fact was among the most reticent in Russia about taking direct military action to resolve the problem. For many years forces in Russia that sympathized with the Donbass had been pushing the Russian government to do more, to intervene directly. Multiple different diplomatic approaches were tried, none of which led anywhere, not least of all because the West, as has now been admitted, never had any intentions of negotiating in good faith and did everything it could to push Russia toward war in hopes that this would result in the fall of the Putin government and the renewed subjugation of Russia to western imperialism.

For all intents and purposes this is an act of self-defense by Russia, on behalf of itself and on behalf of the Russians in the Donbass. By the precedent that NATO itself set during the Yugoslav wars Russia recognized the secession of the Donbass republics and invoked the UN article on collective self-defense, making their intervention legal by international law and defensive.

We support Russia's anti-fascist intervention not only on moral and legal grounds but more importantly because it is a major blow against US imperialism itself, and we recognize it as a fact that US imperialist hegmony is the biggest obstacle to socialism and socialist states everywhere. A defeat for NATO in this proxy war is a victory for the global proletariat. Anti-imperialist, anti-fascist struggle IS class war. Like the first cold war, this new cold war of the US against Russia and China represents a global dimension of the class war.

There is no conceivable scenario under which a "two state solution" is viable. That has been dangled in front of Palestinians for decades, in fact promising this has been a Zionist strategy since the very beginning of the occupation. And by now they've played that card so often they don't even bother anymore, the last time anyone who mattered pretended to take that idea seriously was sometime in the early 90s when they used the Oslo Accords to trick the Palestinians with yet more false promises. And even that pretense turned out to be too much for many of the Zionists and they assassinated their own prime minister in 1995 because the mere suggestion of a compromise was unacceptable to them.

Anyone trying to sell you a "two state solution" is either extremely naive and ignorant of history and of the realities of the Zionist occupation and its ideology, or is deliberately trying to fool Palestinians and their supporters, to weaken and demoralize them by driving a wedge between those who are so desperate, corrupt or easily fooled that they would compromise for the sake of "peace" and those who insist on continuing the struggle for complete liberation.

Now i don't mind China going through the motions of looking like they're trying to negotiate in earnest, that is a geopolitical game they have to play, just like they had to pretend to put forward a "peace plan" for Ukraine. It's good for their global image as the peace broker, which contrasts starkly with the US warmonger who stirs up conflict everywhere. But they know nothing is going to come of it.

I am not anti Ukraine, i am anti-NATO and anti Nazi. I'm pro-Russia because i am pro-Ukraine. I want to see the people of Ukraine liberated, peaceful and prospering and this can only happen if NATO is expelled out of Ukraine along with NATO's proxy fascist junta puppet regime in Kiev.

Right now only Russia's military intervention can achieve that.

Anti-fascist, anti-imperialist struggle is a manifestation of class war. The defeat of imperialism and fascism even by a bourgeois state still advances the cause for the global liberation of the working class. A blow to US hegemony anywhere is a victory for workers everywhere.

If the proposal comes from the collective West you can be sure there are ulterior motives and that it almost certainly at least in part is designed to in some way further the West's strategic goals of weakening and containing Russia and China. Proposals like this need to be worked through with a fine tooth comb by experts who understand the subject and can spot where the US or its various tentacles disguised as "NGOs" are trying to insert poison pills.

The US constantly tries to use international treaties to its advantage to cripple their competitors. At the same time they themselves almost never abide by the rules they seek to impose on others, they always find loopholes. If you ask me this is yet another instance of them trying to hide behind the pretense of environmental protection to deny Russia and China access to regions of the globe that in the future are going to be of critical strategic importance but where the US knows it cannot compete on equal terms. It is more "rules-based order" crap, where they make the rules in their interest and everyone else has to follow them.

China and Russia, and in fact all of the global south would be wise to be very skeptical about any proposals the US and its vassals make no matter what they are about. Whether it's environmental, nuclear, whatever. In fact until conclusively proven otherwise i would just assume it's malicious/subversive and refuse on principle anything that any Western entity proposes, because they will never negotiate in good faith and will always seek to use your well intentioned but naive desire to reach mutually beneficial agreements to advance their own nefarious agenda at your expense.

You really need to prevent people without OP rights from being able to give commands to the server. Can't allow just anyone to be able to upload images. Need much stronger anti-griefing protections. Was considering joining for a while but i'm sorry to say this looks amateurishly managed at the moment. Luckily the troll was an amateur too, you got away easy this time. Could have been much worse, could even have gotten the server admin into legal trouble if they uploaded illegal materials. Communists need to take OpSec seriously.

Complete nonsense.

They comply with UN sanctions. Unfortunately these are very hard to reverse and it is hard for China to continue to credibly championing the UN and international law as opposed to the West's "rules based order" without abiding by UN resolutions. Much of the global south is still being regularly blackmailed and pressured by the US into voting the way the US wants them to in the UN. Over time this will slowly change as the US grows weaker and the global south stronger and more independent, and then these unjust and absurd sanctions will be lifted because most of the world has no issues with the DPRK.

Speaking of Belgium, there is this clip going around on social media at the moment of a representative in Belgian parliament (French speaking) trying to address the question of the Nordstream bombing and getting yelled at for it by other members of parliament who are trying to shut him up. Do you know any details about that incident? Was that a member of a right wing party (i would assume so since in Europe it's unfortunately mostly only right wing populists who are going against the anti-Russia narrative at the moment) and does this sort of thing happen often in Belgian politics? Was that a one-off or is there any chance that more and more questions are starting to be asked about this (and hopefully not just by right wing bigots)?

Please don't use those silly liberal nicknames for Putin. Comparing him to Hitler is tantamount to Nazi apologia. You can find ways of expressing your dislike of Putin without the use of language steeped in anti-Russian propaganda tropes. The same people who use that language to refer to Putin also call Russians "orcs" and other dehumanizing epithets.

"Tankie" is a meaningless term. The PRC has a system that is right for China. Attempts to copy-paste a system that was designed for different historical and material conditions than your own will produce suboptimal results. Every country needs to arrive at a solution to the problem of building socialism that is built on a solid dialectical materialist analysis and adapted to their particular circumstances.