> I'm not sure it will be fruitful to discuss this issue with someone who denies the international ambitions of communism :)

I'm not denying that communists have had international ambitions, only that your description was accurate. And the actual internationalists (Trotskyists) have never had power or organized around it. Extant communist countries were/are part of the idea of "socialism in one country" and tended to fight battles of national liberation or build up arms without actually invading distant countries (in contrast to Western countries).

> "the state is always an instrument of class warfare" I'm justifying western imperialism by referring to the nature of the class struggle as characterized by communists. You're not going to convince anyone by denying that communists were interested in spreading their ideology to other countries tries by force

I would challenge anyone to name a communist country that attempted to export their ideology by force subject to the following reasonable conditions:

(1) They can't be really weird dictators supported / propped up by a Western anticommunist power dead-set on killing other communists.

(2) Can't name the Eastern bloc, as it was a product of a defensive countering of a genocidal campaign by Nazis (Lebensraum).

> and you're not going to convince capitalists by pointing out how successful we were at stopping communist aggression.

What aggression?

> how patrician of you

Not really, I'm referring to a literally feudal monarchy that had very limited regional power.

> quality of life was pretty bad leading up to the fall, that's why it fell.

It very much isn't.

> observing that you can conscript a bunch of farmers to invade outlying countries and steal their grain, then feed those of the survivors you haven't tortured to death in gulags is hardly an argument.

Do you believe that's an accurate summary of the USSR becoming a superpower?

> I'd be more impressed by the superpower claim if it wasn't the case that the USSR went bankrupt trying to compete as a superpower.

It didn't. It was eaten from the inside by a political power grab. However, spending on the military vs. everything else did contribute to support for that power grab.

> can you sell your labor or the product thereof for a price of your choosing? Can you buy tools for work and control them as your own property, inclusive of charging rent for their usage? These are QoL issues that are relevant to workers.

Just to be clear, you're listing examples for why communist countries didn't work or significantly improve over their past ways of being? I don't see why this constitutes not working or improving.

> Capital is the means of production and it requires maintenance and planning, if capital is not maintained and replaced it wears out and breaks and is no longer capital. The planners in the USSR knew this well and that's why they had so much trouble keeping the system going when they wielded authoritarian powers. They couldn't keep the capital running because they lacked price signals in order to obtain information about scarcity relative to demand. Those public programs had run out of value to reallocate.

How convenient that the capital ran out at the exact moment that color revolutions occurred and liberal parties took power, years and years apart from one another!

> Yes, ideology is good for justifying terrible things. Thats why we require that people are allowed to criticize ideology.

My point is, of course, that the ideology I'm referring to is consistent, in addition to having a rationale, whereas the alternative being discussed is incoherent.

> Yet liberal democracy still falls victim to the paradox of tolerance. Hence the desire to prohibit ideas and ideologies that would overthrow civil society.

I'm referring to days, weeks, months after deposing communist party rule. Unless you grant that "civil society" existed there already, then there's nothing to overthrow. In reality, it is an illiberal power grab dictated by servicing of capital, a ridiculous farce of the multi-party democracies that protesters had demanded.

> Actually I question your grasp of the foundational ideas of "The West", whatever that is.

I think it's pretty clear what "The West" refers to relative to communist countries.

But thanks for the personal jab!

> I'm not sure your criticism of The West is apt when it is those several countries that fail to heed their respective majorities in returning to authoritarian central planning.

Seems apt to me. Good talk, good talk.

> Perhaps you are falling victim to the authoritarian's paradox here. Perhaps those democracies are simply engaged in the sort of central planning that is necessary to sustain a society, the kind of central planning that the communist republics they replaced were unable to stomach.

Those "democracies" were privatizing, not pushing a different form of central planning.

Unfortunately, there is a very selectively-enforced limit on political content that has resulted in me being rate-limited, so I'm unable to respond to you in a timely manner anymore. I'd point you at some resources but I feel like that's condescending. Hilariously, this is pretty relevant to your civil society comment - online spaces have no public commons, they are all dictated and censored by whoever owns them, with serious networking effects that place them under the control of large (and censorious) corporations that treat liberal (capitalist) views as normative and non-political.