I will not defend Stalin and I will not defend the CCP. Just because capitalism isn’t good doesn’t mean that we have to glaze imperialist states. Ask Ukraine and the Baltic states how good they had it during the USSR; my point being that pro-USSR sentiments are largely just pro-Russian propaganda.
China is doing some good nowadays, but it still definitely has corruption. There are still billionaires, polluted air, capitalistic factories—which have terrible working conditions and sell cheaply made carcinogenic products, they’re building AI data centres—some of which will boil the water temperature, bans citizens from accessing a lot of websites, etc.
I even decided to join a solidarity website and it mentioned f**cking Kim Jong-Un as a leftist figure ffs 💀. Literally, ANY North Korean defector will tell you how bad the North Korean regime is. The site had no mention of actual decent examples like Peter Kropotkin, Nelson Mandela, Thomas Sankara, Martin Luther King Jr, or even Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.
Edit: did not know that Proudhon was a bigot. My bad; thanks immensely for telling me.
This fact is why anarchism is so appealing to me, they don’t have all the answers but they’ve at least identified the problem: Authority.
It’s kind of also the biggest problem with anarchy. It still has a foundation of social contract, the idea that we’re allowed to exist without authority. There really isn’t anything that stops someone from building power and exerting it on others. No one wants to accept a despot over freedom but if someone rolls up to my farm in a tank and says they own it now, I’m not really in any position to say otherwise. In a hierarchy of need, living sits above liberty.
That’s why I can’t be an anarchist. They’re like the libertarians of the left. They’re too idealistic. They never explain how they’ll keep people from asserting power over others, and prevent nation states from forming, because it isn’t possible without giving a different person similar power.
I’ll take an imperfect but stable system over one that collapses the second someone with bad intentions gains control over weapons or other means of exerting power.