I read through your comment and know you won’t respond to this, but I’ll respond nevertheless for anyone lurking or on the off-chance you read this.

First, when I described your individualist worldview, I did not mean this as a negative description, but instead an explanatory one. The primary issue with your analysis is seeing socialism as a relationship between two people, rather than two classes. This is why, for you, cooperatives are automatically socialist, but an economy run and controlled by the working class as a whole is not. I understand that you may see yourself as largely a communal, cooperative person, but this isn’t the same as how you actually frame systems and their components.

Next, since this is a Lemmy comment, I did have to oversimplify anarchism. I do understand that it’s incredibly broad (and this is part of the problem I have with it, but that’s a topic for another day). I did actually justify the cells -> class distinctions bit earlier, but I’ll be more direct. When different localized cells have different access to land, labor, and capital, this ownership within the local cell creates a disparity between other cells, leveraging into advantages that turn into class. This is why Marxists advocate collectivizing into one unified system, rather than splitting up everything into semi-autonymous cells.

Regarding unions that wish to be separate from a federation of unions within a socialist context, we have to understand what they are trying to be independent from and why. What does a Union have to gain by lowering its bargaining power through shrinking itself? Nothing. The only thing it gains is the ability to go against the broader system. That system is a socialist system, so we have to understand here that this is a fulcrum by which capitalists can destabilize the rest of the system. Independence isn’t the problem, it’s independence from what. Again, the structures are not independent from their context.

As for wanting to reduce the power of states and capitalists, unfortunately this in practice turns into opposition to the working class whenever they successfully establish state power. The state is not a body above the class struggle, but within it. By assuming that the state is inherently wrong, you run into ideological crisis when you see a socialist state, and then begin assuming incorrectly claims of neocolonialism, capitalism, etc, with no actual materialist basis. The numbers do not side with you here.

As for saying China is pursuing “capitalist GDP growth” simply because they actually are seeking an expansion to productive forces, which just so happens to coincide with increased profits, this again doesn’t help your case. You work backwards from “socialist states are bad,” then assume negativity from every advancing metric. Improving productive capacity is essential for establishing socialism, and has not come at the expense of the working classes:

Again, though, you never justified how any of the metrics you listed were inherently capitalist. “Work ethic” is not capitalist, for example. As I said, you just added “capitalist” to various things and never justified any of it. As for the chart, it’s from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, explaining the process of developing into communism. It’s of course a Marxist POV, so it inherently is supportive of socialist states, but this does not make it incorrect.

As for China and your baseless claims of neocolonialism, the west is actively neocolonial. The west uses financial domination of the global south, including dollar hegemony, IP monopoly, unequal exchange, and more to extract as much surplus from the global south as possible. China does not, and the reason it does not is because it isn’t dominated by private finance capital. Private finance capital is the main driver of imperialism as a stage in capitalism, and because you have not looked into the causes of imperialism and neocolonialism and have not looked at the numbers, you assume that the socialists must be guilty as well:

• Five Imperialist Myths About China’s Role in Africa

• China debt trap? PH an ‘expert in bad loans,’ Locsin says

• Deborah Brautigam Debunks the Chinese Debt Trap Theory in New Research Paper

• China’s Debt Relief for Africa: Emerging Deliberations

As for all of your claims of the positives of the Soviet Union, they are true for the People’s Republic of China as well, with the exception that the PRC uses private property in secondary and developing industries. Life expectancy doubled in China and the USSR, literacy went from the low 30s to 99.9%, homelessness has largely been eradicated. You are again taking a religious stance, seeing any instance of private property as a “sin,” instead of looking at how socialism actually develops. You dismissed the chart I provided earlier, as well as the explanations I gave for private property in China, all because you work backwards from an assumed conclusion.

All in all, if you are rooting for China, why not look into how and why it works? Why not listen to the Chinese themselves explain how their system works and why they chose it?