Ok, I’m going to try lay this out as clearly as I can, because I think you’re mixing up what materialism and idealism actually mean (even if we haven’t used their names to this point it is the core of the argument).

The main tool of my analysis is materialism. Put simply: the way people organise production, how they meet their needs, who owns what, who has to sell their labour, this is the foundation. Ideas, culture, politics, they arise from and reflect that material base. They aren’t illusions, but they don’t float free. People think and act, but they do so within conditions they didn’t choose.

Ideas matter. People can be persuaded, misled, organised, educated. But those ideas only take hold because they connect to real conditions. You can’t sustain a set of ideas that are completely out of step with how people actually live. And you can’t just will a new society into existence because it sounds good. Ideas move things along, but they don’t set the underlying terrain.

What you’re arguing with is idealism. In short, idealism puts ideas first. It treats consciousness, values, or narratives as the engine of history, as if reality bends to what people believe rather than belief being shaped by reality. When you say the mode of production is a “choice,” or that solidarity is basically a matter of interpretation, you’re putting ideas in the driver’s seat. That treats history like a competition between narratives, where whichever idea wins out determines reality.

But that’s not how it works. People don’t get to pick a mode of production the way they pick a belief. Capitalism didn’t arise because it was persuasive. It arose because older systems stopped functioning under pressure and new relations became necessary to keep production going. The same logic applies to any transition out of it. There’s a reason certain ideas appear at certain times and not others, and it’s not just because someone made a good argument.

None of this means people are robots or that they can’t act against their interests. Obviously they can. Propaganda exists, divisions exist, fear exists. But even that happens within limits. If ideas were truly primary, you wouldn’t need to look at anything outside discourse to explain social change, and that clearly doesn’t hold up.

On your last point, you’re also treating “authority” as if it automatically creates a class, and that’s just not how class works. Class isn’t about who gives orders day to day. It’s about relationship to the means of production. Who owns them as property, who controls them in a way that lets them extract surplus, who can pass that control on.

Administrators, officials, organisers, these are roles within a system. In a system where production isn’t privately owned as capital, people in those roles don’t become a separate class just because they have authority. They don’t own the factories, land, or infrastructure as something they can sell or accumulate. Their position depends on the broader structure, not the other way around.

If that changes, if people in those positions start turning control into private, inheritable ownership, then you’re dealing with a class shift. But that has to be shown in actual material terms. You don’t get there just by pointing at hierarchy and calling it a class.

It is possible but not under capitalism which social democracy aims to preserve, It is possible under socialism as is seen in the PRC or the former USSR but that’s not social democracy.

Social democracy needs superprofits from the periphery to fund the core. Social democracy is a type of capitalism. Capitalism requires exploitation to function. If every nation is the core, who gets exploited? The surplus value does not exist.

Those “social democratic” parties in the periphery aren’t proof the model works globally. They’re rebranded revolutionary movements (MPLA, FRELIMO, ANC) that dropped Marxist-Leninist labels after the Soviet Union collapsed. Without that protection, they faced a stark choice: adopt the language of the Socialist International or risk regime change, sanctions, or outright intervention by the imperial core. The label shift was a survival tactic, not evidence that social democracy can function in a peripheral economy (because it can’t).

Technically, it’s built on the idea that a socialist society can be/should be reached gradually by participating in parliamentary liberal political system instead of overthrowing liberal society and implementing a “dictatorship of the proletariat”.

You are mixing social democrats with democratic socialists. Democratic socialists, however ineffective or utopian, at least retain socialist aims in theory. Social democrats do not. Their program, accepts the permanence of capitalist property relations. Their project is not the abolition of exploitation but its rationalization: a “fairer” distribution of imperial superprofits among the labor aristocracy of the core. This is not a path to socialism. It is a management strategy for capitalism.

The meme is clearly pointing out that “social democracy enjoyers” turn into fascists/Nazis once the economy declines. Or, if we keep OP’s caption in mind, the idea that social democrats are actually fascists “wearing a mask”.

The social democrat’s mask, like the liberal’s, depends entirely on the surplus extracted from the periphery. When that flow contracts, the mask comes off. In the words of Malcolm X on a similar issue: “The white conservatives aren’t friends of the Negro either, but they at least don’t try to hide it. They are like wolves; they show their teeth in a snarl that keeps the Negro always aware of where he stands with them. But the white liberals are foxes, who also show their teeth to the Negro but pretend that they are smiling.” Social democracy operates the same way. Its niceties are financed by imperial rent. When the rent falls, it defaults to open class defense.

What helped Hitler seize power was not just the actions/inactions of the socdems and the economic collapse, but the deep split of the left overall, the ineffective political system and the relentless infighting to the point were socdems and communists saw eachother as equivalent or even a bigger threat than the fascists.

I explicitly said “helped,” not “solely responsible.” Multiple factors converged in 1933. But the SPD’s role was decisive in one key respect: they preserved the bourgeois state apparatus after 1918. Through the Ebert-Groener pact, they kept the reactionary judiciary, the imperial officer corps, and the bureaucratic machinery intact. They unleashed the Freikorps on the KPD. They refused every proposal for a united working class front against the Nazis. Stalin characterized this relationship precisely when he stated that “Social-Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism” and that these organizations “are not antipodes, they are twins.” The KPD’s analysis recognized that in a crisis, social democracy functions as the left wing of counterrevolution. History confirmed that analysis.

Fear isn’t the driver. Fear is produced. Where does that fear come from? Not from brains. From material life. Precarity. Job loss. Debt. Crisis. These are capitalist relations, not neural pathways. If amygdala size determined politics, how do you explain workers who risk everything to strike? Or revolutionaries who face death without flinching? Consciousness changes through struggle, not anatomy. Doubling down on amygdala talk is phrenology-tier pseudoscience, same logic as Nazi race science. Measuring skulls to explain politics didn’t work then, measuring brains won’t work now. The “no change party” exists to preserve bourgeois rule, not because of brain scans. This idealist framing naturalizes oppression and lets capital off the hook.

They also entirely fund their system through super exploitation of the periphery.

No. Social democracy needs superprofits from the periphery to fund the core. Capitalism requires exploitation to function. If every nation is the core, who gets exploited? The surplus value does not exist. When accumulation slows, the bourgeoisie abandons reform. They choose fascism to protect property. The SPD proved this when they sided with reactionaries against workers. Reformism tries to manage a system built on violence. It cannot work globally because the economic base forbids it. The only path is revolution. Seize the means of production. End the imperialist chain.

Do you have any points or do you prefer the tried and true call people names and stick your fingers in your ears?

The meme is about how socialdemocrats entire ideology is built upon “reforming” capitalism by implementing a welfare state to more evenly spread the profits of the super exploitation of the periphery. When those profits dry up so too does the welfare state which inevitably pushes them right or left to deal with the heightened contradictions. The meme is pointing out the unfortunate pattern of it almost always ending in a rightward shift (due to many factors). (It is also possibly a reference to the SPD and how them unleashing the freikorps on the KPD directly helped bring Hitler to power)

Reducing fascism to amygdala size is idealist pseudoscience (in the vein of nazi race science), biology does not dictate politics. Material conditions drive history. Fascism emerges when capitalist contradictions sharpen and the tendency for the rate of profit to fall creates crisis. The bourgeoisie faces two paths. Either socialist revolution or they turn imperialist violence inward to preserve accumulation. The Nazis suppressed the left to protect industrial capital. Krupp and IG Farben did not care about conservative values but cared about markets and crushing unions. Calling it National Socialism was a tactic to co-opt worker sentiment while serving monopoly capital. Fear is merely a symptom, the disease is capitalism. When accumulation stalls the mask comes off, focus on who owns the means of production not brain scans.

Thank you 🫡

Thank you always happy to hear when people find my contributions informative/useful.

It’s the material reality. The fact Vietnam was fighting a common enemy clearly helped but the core of support was the same as the reason they supported African liberation, to bring an end to colonialism. I think bringing an end to imperialism and colonialism is an unambiguous good. “Virtue” is nonsense anyway might as well talk about sins or ontological good and evil. The material outcomes is all that matters.

Social democrats tend not to call the US authoritarian (I have yet to see it). They’re too busy negotiating their cut of imperial plunder, welfare states built on extracted surplus and “human rights” rhetoric that conveniently ignores sanctions and coups. If “the center defines the standard,” then the standard isn’t about coercion; it’s about loyalty to capital (as I already pointed out). The label only sticks to those who break ranks (refuse to bend the knee to the EuroAmerikan hegemony).

On mode of production as “choice”: this is idealism, pure and simple. Putting the cart before the horse. Ideas don’t shape the material base; the material base shapes ideas. Capitalism didn’t arrive because someone imagined it. Feudal relations broke because they could no longer contain the productive forces, guilds choked industry, serfdom blocked labor, divine right couldn’t manage global accumulation. Socialism isn’t a fairy tale we opt into. It becomes necessary when capital’s own contradictions (overproduction, immiseration, ecological rupture) can no longer be managed within private ownership. And solidarity isn’t moral selection or simply who we like or don’t like. It’s determined by objective interests. The Chinese revolution for example united workers, peasants, and the national bourgeoisie not because of abstract ideals, but because all three had material stakes in smashing imperialist and feudal domination.

On the vanguard: have you read Lenin? Mao? The entire point is that it is NOT neutral. The vanguard is explicitly the organized, conscious detachment of the proletariat, an instrument of class rule, just like the bourgeois state, but inverted. The difference isn’t the existence of authority; it’s which class wields it, for what end, and whether its practice is tied to mass line feedback. To conflate proletarian dictatorship with bourgeois state power is to erase the question of class content.

Authority isn’t a substance that “festers.” It’s a relation, grounded in who controls production, who allocates surplus, who defends or transforms property forms. You can’t analyze it like a moral contaminant. You have to trace it to its material base. When authority serves to socialize wealth, decommodify life, and break imperial chains, it isn’t reproducing domination, it’s creating the conditions where coercion itself becomes obsolete.

Yes the Soviets and Chinese of the time very much wanted Vietnam to be free of colonialism just like in Korea.

Your framework sounds nice in the abstract, but it doesn’t hold up against the concrete reality of how the term functions today. “Authoritarian” isn’t applied based on some neutral scale of centralization. It’s very clearly deployed selectively as a moral weapon by the Euro-Amerikan ideological apparatus to delegitimize any state or movement that resists imperial integration or challenges capitalist property relations.

If the criterion were truly about concentration of coercive power, the United States (with the world’s largest incarcerated population, extrajudicial drone programs, domestic surveillance architectures like COINTELPRO and it’s successors, and an executive branch that operates beyond legislative or judicial restraint on the whims of the president) would be the paradigmatic case. Yet it rarely (never) receives the label in mainstream discourse. Why? Because the term isn’t neutral.

On the historical point: classes aren’t created or dissolved to adjust the “level” of authority. They emerge and transform through shifts in the mode of production and the intensification of class struggle. The bourgeois revolutions didn’t aim to “spread” or “centralize” authority. They smashed feudal state forms to erect new ones that secured the dictatorship of capital (parliamentary democracy, rule of law, private property enforcement) all presented as “freedom” while materially consolidating a new class rule. The question was never how much authority, but authority for whom and against whom.

Anarchist models that treat authority as a contaminant to be minimized misunderstand the state as a neutral tool rather than an instrument of class power. In a world still structured by antagonistic classes, the relevant distinction isn’t between “more” or “less” authority, but between authority that reproduces exploitation and authority that dismantles it. The proletarian state, like any state, exercises coercion, but its historical task is to render itself obsolete by abolishing the class relations that make coercion necessary.

In it’s modern usage the term obscures more than it reveals. As it’s not meant to be a useful tool for analysing states, power or history, but a bat to beat those who don’t get in line.

2 things quickly:

Authoritarian is a meaningless pejorative. All states/countries/political groups etc. must be authoritarian by necessity in class society.

This meme isn’t about states being overthrow this meme is about how socialdemocrats entire ideology is built upon “reforming” capitalism by implementing a welfare state to more evenly spread the profits of the super exploitation of the periphery. When those profits dry up so too does the welfare state which inevitably pushes them right or left to deal with the heightened contradictions. The meme is pointing out the unfortunate pattern of it almost always ending in a rightward shift (due to many factors).

The USA, along with the rest of NATO, wants Ukraine to remain independent

Lmao

Remember, the US is just one nation providing military aid to Ukraine.

Mark Rutte leader of NATO said it himself that NATO is just means for the US to project power.

Even Australia

Even “CIA Base pretending to be a country” is contributing. They literally disappeared a PM for not being thankful enough for pine gap.

Taking you at your word for this, let’s say Germany spends the 5 billion to send 300 of those to guard the pipeline. What good is that should Iran decide to use it’s IRBM stock or hypersonics like the Fattah 1? Drones are only 1 part of Iran’s offensive capability.