Memes

Candidates can be selected from non-party members, but they are absolutely selected by the party members, and after nomination are assigned a party.

Somewhat, and you're not even factoring in the taean system at the factory level.

The reason is humor. That, and I feel negatively.

I don't really think taking a permanently negative, endlessly "skeptical" stance towards some of the most propagandized against countries in the world is a good thing. It reeks of chauvanism and "left" anti-communism.

You can join any political party you want in the same sense that you can work for any company you want in a Bourgeois society. That is, you can join if they want you to.

Sure? That's a good thing, parties should be able to expel corrupt or poorly-performing members. You can't have your cake and eat it here too, either parties have to be open and thus vulnerable to the corruption you keep hinting that they may have, or they need mechanisms for preventing such problems and dealing with them as they arise. Again, "left" anti-communism.

My deal is that I’m interested in how a bunch of Communists convinced themselves to support undemocratic political structures. I have read some Lenin and Mao, but its not the same as engaging with people who really believe in it. We’re all people, and ones with ostensibly similar political aims, and yet we came to such different conclusions.

The political structures are democratic, though. The reason you and I have come to different conclusions is that you let a fantasy of "pure socialism" in your head, free of hierarchy, problems, and class struggle, be the enemy of existing socialist systems. This is why you kept getting quoted Gramsci's teardown of Bordiga:

Comrade Bordiga limits himself to upholding a cautious position on all the questions raised by the Left. He doesn’t say: the International poses and resolves such and such a question in this way, but the Left will instead pose and resolve it this other way. He instead says: the way the International poses and resolves problems doesn’t convince me; I fear they might slip into opportunism; there are insufficient guarantees against this; etc. His position, then, is one of permanent suspicion and doubt. In this way the position of the “Left” is purely negative: they express reservations without specifying them in a concrete form, and above all without indicating in concrete form their own point of view and their solutions. They end up spreading doubt and distrust without offering anything constructive.

The article begins with a characteristic metaphysical hypothesis: Comrade Bordiga asks whether we can 100% exclude the possibility that the Communist International will slip into opportunism. But we could also ask whether it’s possible to exclude the possibility that even Comrade Bordiga would become an opportunist, that the Pope will become an atheist, that Henry Ford will become a communist, etc. In the realm of metaphysical possibilities one can muse indefinitely, but a Marxist should pose the question differently: Is there a real possibility that the Communist International is no longer the vanguard of the proletariat, but is rather en route to becoming the expression of the workers’ aristocracy, corrupted by the bourgeoisie? When the question is posed Marxistically it becomes easy for any comrade to resolve it.

This all applies perfectly to your use of skepticism as a weapon to avoid actually grappling with the complexities of building socialism in real life. You take the possibility of problems with a system as evidence for failure.

there have recently been so many pro-DPRK memes, will you not begrudge me a few critical memes?

Why should the fact that there are pro-DPRK memes justify anti-DPRK memes? If there were a bunch of anti-slavery memes, would having a pro-slavery meme be justified in the name of "balance?" No. This argument doesn't hold any water. My issue with your "criticism" is the same as that of Gramsci's towards Bordiga: your critique is "sterile and negative," it offers no solutions and only spreads doubt and division. This isn't comradely critique, it's just doomerism.

From where am I to learn about “reality”? Not personal testimony, not by reading legal documents, not by thinking about the consequences of consolidated political power? Am I to assume that a state doesn’t oppress its citizens and is democratic merely because it purports to be inspired by the teachings of Karl Marx?

You begin by reading and studying. Read the news, laws, and what pro-socialist groups are saying. You aren't to "assume" anything, we must find the truth from facts. The problem here is that you are assuming the opposite, that a socialist state is anti-democratic and is oppressing its citizens for no reason.

Either you do not understand what control is, or you refuse to acknowledge a class not mentioned in the writings of Friedrich Engels.

I understand what control is, I have yet to see you make a compelling argument for why we should abandon the Marxist understanding of class. You kept trying to invent the idea of an administrator class, but experience shows that the Marxist understanding of class is correct, that the state is representative of the ruling class in society, and not outside of that.

Yes, I read the book. Thank you. It was a little out of date, but overall informative.

It was published in 2023. It isn't as up-to-date as it would be if it were written today, but in terms of scholarly texts on socialist democracy in english it's one of the latest.

Overall, the problems with your "critique" is that you offer no solutions, feel entirely too comfortable speaking your mind as though factual without doing due dilligence beforehand, and that this contributes towards anti-revolutionary doomerism rather than constructive, comradely criticism from a sympathetic and knowledgeable point of view.