I need to reread State and Revolution, cause I want to say Lenin distinguishes between the two there as OP replied, where one is transition state and the other is after the state has “withered away” but now I can’t recall exactly if he used that specific terminology. Either way, the phrasing I tend to see used is that there is a socialist worker state with a vanguard party who suppresses the capitalist class and has a dictatorship of the working class, or proletariat. And then there is communism, which is the end goal to transition to. But the party itself is communist.

So something like:

• People doing socialist worker state: communists heading up a communist vanguard party that focuses on the needs of the masses and on educating them in communist principles and methods of analysis (such as dialectical materialism), and guards against the reaction
• The state power model: dictatorship of the proletariat in order to suppress the capitalist class and empower the proletariat
• Goals: to create and maintain a socialist state along the lines of “to each according to their contribution” and transition to a communist “to each according to their needs” as the need for the state “withers away,” and maintain the revolution which is an ongoing process of transition and guarding against the reaction, not something that ends as soon as you have state power.

If anyone thinks I’m oversimplifying, am open to correction. (Is worth noting that the details of this will vary some in practice because of the conditions unique to the socialist project and what they have developed and so on.)

Forgot to mention, people with NPD are in the same vicinity as psychopathy, with not feeling empathy or shame. That’s an important part of why it isn’t just another mental health disorder to treat, and why it’s such a serious designation, as compared to describing a person as a little vain. People who can’t feel empathy may still be able to intellectualize it, so it’s not to say they’re guaranteed to be ‘evil’ or something. And people who do feel empathy can still do horrific things. But it’s a pretty serious characteristic of the disorder.

If you mean narcissistic as in self-absorbed, I don’t see millennials being that way more than any other generation. Individualism appears to encourage an “I got mine” mentality where people are overly focused on carving out their little fortress of safety and happiness with little regard for how others are doing or how their hiding within their fortress contributes to the overall state of things. But that’s more of a thing of tapping out of society, whereas, as a pathology, narcissism thrives on attention and admiration. I would think people who are going out of their way to broadcast their life choices, they’re either doing it as a vlogging thing as desperate for money, or they specifically are wanting to know how society feels about things and where they land within it. Which doesn’t necessarily have to do with pathology. I mean, remember we are social beings. And wanting approval from your peers and reassurance that you aren’t an aberration is not narcissistic on its own; I’d say it’s very normal.

In my experience with very few people who seemed distinctly pathological narcissism, it’s not just being bothered by criticism or wanting attention alone. I almost want to say it’s sort of like, if you imagine someone addicted to hard drugs, but instead they are addicted to attention and admiration. So everything in their life becomes about that, it impacts their relationships, the kind of choices they make, and they use people as sources of narcissistic supply, maneuvering them into positions where they can control them and extract from them like resources. It’s not just hurt feelings or defensiveness or posting selfies, it’s like a part of their identity and some of them become disturbingly effective at using people to feed their addiction. (Side note: Addiction may not be the best analogy, cause I’m not sure how much success attempts to heal narcissists has, but it’s the way I could think of atm to convey how deep a thing it is compared to someone who is a little egotistical or gets mad at criticism some of the time.)

I’ve not researched this piece extensively, but I am remembering now this piece on Jonestown: http://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=78282#p8

The narrative associated with Jonestown of people being misguided in their thinking and so “drinking the Kool-Aid” may have been a major distortion. It’s been some time since I read through the article in full. I’ll try to see about re-reading it later, so I’m more clear on that point.

edit: wording

I can still remember somewhat when I thought like them (maybe not as egoistically as some, but still…). There’s this noticeable blind spot in it that relates to what people are saying about state department talking points. “I do research and check sources” means little if your inherent assumption is that US and allied sources are reliable and anywhere the US calls an enemy is unreliable and suspicious. The US has crafted this narrative that impartiality and neutrality is possible if you simply decouple emotional tone from what you’re saying, wear a suit while saying it, and outsource the narrative to someone who isn’t a direct elected official of the government.

But… though there are elements of reality that are observably true with consistency, there is no such thing as being neutral. Every narrative has to choose what information to include or not include and how to include it. You can’t include things on “both sides” and now you are impartial. For example, if one group has power and another has none, speaking about them as if they are on equal footing in a mutually-instigated conflict is not neutrality, it’s implicitly taking the side of the group that has power.

Conscious fascists understand this and they choose to side with dehumanization, with systemic violence. Many a well-meaning liberal does not understand this and acts like they can rise above, extract themself from the fray, stand apart, and be clearer of mind for it. But the real clarity comes from understanding what the factions are, the sides there are, and choosing sides. When I thought like a liberal, I had to rely on forced attempts at universalizing complex situations and reducing them to vulgarized oversimplifications about “human nature” or “cultural trends” or some such vague thing. When I started thinking like a dialectical and historical materialist and learning about the movements and events that have come before, even with only a bare bones understanding of it, I got way more clarity than I ever got out of “do research and check sources” liberalism.

I think of that satirical idea, Last Thursdayism, that the universe was created last thursday, in such a way that it would seem like it has been around for a long time. That is what I would compare liberal “free thinker” thought process to. It behaves as if history began only a few days ago, as if everything runs on simplistic, unchanging universal themes, and if you just point at the themes and laugh, you’ll be above the fray and can be content with knowing you’re not falling for the tricks that those not-free-thinkers do.

Fine print: But only if the USA had a regime that was in opposition to the USA exploiting its citizens, land, resources, indigenous and otherwise marginalized groups. And then the USA would use a color revolution to justify couping the USA and create a brutal and suppressive government that was far worse than anything previous.

So let me get this straight, your family bribed your way into owning a factory and you want sympathy because you had to give it up? Meanwhile, in the US, the supreme court is going to be ruling on whether states can fine people for sleeping outdoors, while homelessness gets worse. It might be the case that had your family done the same in the US, you’d still have that factory and be wealthy too. That’s not a good thing. The dictatorship of capital in the US comes at the cost of everyone else.

In the US, cities have been known to bulldoze homeless encampments: https://www.vice.com/en/article/5db7qb/dc-bulldozed-a-homeless-persons-tent-while-they-were-still-inside

And you’re saying “China bad, US good” because you lost control of a factory.

Then there’s the part where they are so deep in paranoia and racism they think you are a foreign spy if you say anything sympathetic about the country. (I actually had this happen to me once online.)

Reminds me of that quote, IIRC from Capitalist Realism, “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” The way it’s ingrained in some people goes very deep. When their view is that it’s capitalism or nothing, it sort of makes sense their only view of an alternative is running away from it rather than confronting it.

Oh yeah, political education in the US is oversimplified warmongering dross. And the vilification of anything anti-capitalist that is formed as an organized system is a real problem in the way people get taught politically. Far too many people who will say stuff like “communism sounds nice on paper, but in practice, it was just people pretending to care and then becoming dictators.” Or they’ll say that it’s “idealistic” when the reality is that it’s an obnoxiously scientific exchange between theory and practice and is in opposition to notions of purely “striving to be morally better” as a means of achieving meaningful change.

It’s far too common in the US for people to be terrified of nations they’ve never set foot in and think they know better than entire peoples and cultures they’ve never met because they read a few news headlines that said what the situation is supposedly like.

whatever the fuck

If you don’t know what is actually going on in China, it’s probably better not to speak as an authority on it. Good intentions don’t inherently make you any more effective at being well-informed. You can be more well-informed still, if you translate the intent to a certain amount of humility about what you know and find the right people to listen to. Right now, how you come across to me is a western chauvinist who is determined to oversimplify the world and pretend other cultures and peoples are identical to yours, while speaking from a position of implied superiority of knowledge and understanding of the world.

You might think that’s a lot to extrapolate from your post, but the tone of your post is a lot more generic of an ideological position than you might realize. It’s good that you recognize the harm capitalism causes. But that can’t be the end of it or you miss the larger picture of the world’s development and history. You have to recognize what colonialism and imperialism are, as a bare minimum, and preferably attain some understanding of how the targets of these things have developed in their efforts toward self-determination. Notably, the western empire is still an ongoing thing to contend with. If you exclude that from your understanding of nations, you will be viewing the world through a simplified lens of “good/bad nation” and missing a large portion of not only development and the whys behind it, but also information and bias, and being able to recognize, for example, that much of the “information” you will find from the western empire about China is coming from a place of empire wanting to undermine it.

Recognition of biases is pivotal to going further than condemnation of vague descriptions of reality like “greed.” Greed is real, but it is insufficient to explain the mechanisms of development of a nation, a people, much less the entire world. Choosing to consciously side with colonized people’s over colonizers is a form of bias, but this does not make it bad. There is no escaping bias. There is no ideology where you can be above the fray. The question is, do you come to recognize the biases and choose sides, or do you pretend to be above it and condemn vague descriptions of behavior that are commonly associated with immoral action. The second one might make you feel good, but it offers no materially proven solutions to the problems of the day. The first one is what history is actually operating on and will continue to operate on, whether you recognize the mechanisms or not.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts on it. I’m happy to hear it resonates. :)

This reminds me of a thought I had the other day, which went something like: some people (seems to be a US thing, can’t speak for elsewhere) are so stuck with the mindset of approaching politics as, “I am on equal footing with you in terms of knowledge and understanding” that it’s virtually impossible to get through on the information you give them alone. They have to first confront their socialized arrogance about knowledge and start to unlearn the idea that politics is some kind of easily universalized, mostly opinion-based entity.

Like if I look at my own progression of views, a significant difference in me being a “leftist” vs. being a “ML” (or thereabouts) was consciously trying to unlearn elitism and consciously trying to listen more (to marginalized people especially, but more importantly, to marginalized people who have theory/practice knowledge to impart, even if I didn’t know it in those terms right away) and talk less (resist the urge to comment “because I can” and try to be more conscious of why I’m reacting the way I am if someone’s take gets under my skin). This shift in mindset and attitude coupled with some partly guided exposure to theory was pivotal for me. I had a significant amount of “I can think smart so I can work this out just as well as you can” arrogance socializing to get through and a significant amount of viewing politics as overly simplistic in nature, and I see that same kind of attitude play out in other people, talking like their takes on politics have weight just because they are allowed to have one. When it’s like no, halt the universalizing, you need a framework to work from with a conscious motive behind it and that is found in sincerely caring about the plight of working class people, the marginalized, the colonized, and applying what liberators have observed about it who came before and who still exist now in developing socialist projects. It is humbling to get a glimpse of the depth of combined theory and practice that exists and has existed, and I would say it’s a good sign for people in the situation described if it is humbling because they are so often socialized to put their own intellect on a personal and cultural pedestal.

If there is anyone who could become a billionaire and then, somehow, without any working class force to make it happen, through sheer incapability to do anything sensible, become an eX-billionaire, it would be Elon Musk.