That’s fair. You have to start somewhere.

Thank you. I am surprised to hear that even serious organisations are not running night classes or the like. I had heard groups such as the BPP would intensively study Chairman Mao’s 红宝书 as a group.

You’re very clearly a “baby leftist” from your few comments here so I really don’t want you to take this the wrong way. You really need to read some theory. Your heart is seemingly in the right place but that doesn’t mean much when you have yet to deconstruct your liberal foundations and actually come to understand the how and why of scientific socialism.

Cowbee’s reading list should give you a good start

Socialism is not an end point. It is the transitionary phase between capitalism and communism.

On Authority

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https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/suicide-rate-by-country

You are a loser. You really should stop talking about things you don’t know or understand.

You’re still doing the same shell game: redefining terms mid-argument, ignoring material institutions, then declaring victory.

You said “every attempt at communism results in elites stealing surplus labor.” That is a specific claim about class extraction. It is not the same thing as “inequality exists.” You keep pretending they’re interchangeable because your original statement collapses otherwise.

You wave away Cuba by saying “whoever controls the state owns the surplus.” That’s liberal abstraction. Cuban officials do not privately own factories, land, or finance. Surplus is overwhelmingly allocated socially (healthcare, education, housing, food subsidies) under permanent blockade. That is categorically different from capitalist ownership. Calling every state-administered surplus “elite theft” empties the concept of meaning.

You dismiss Yugoslavia even though workers’ councils directly controlled enterprises and surplus. That alone falsifies your “every attempt” claim. Your preferences don’t override historical structure.

On China under Mao Zedong, you claim redistribution was “just revolution, not communism.” No. Those mechanisms were implemented through socialist institutions: collectivization, mass-line governance, cadre supervision, campaigns explicitly aimed at suppressing bureaucratic privilege. When inequality later rose after political line changes, you treat that as proof against socialism instead of proof that outcomes depend on material conditions and leadership. You’re proving the materialist point while denying it.

You invoke the “nomenklatura” in the Soviet Union as if this is some revelation. Marxists have analyzed bureaucratic degeneration for over a century. Yes, a privileged stratum emerged under siege, devastation, and isolation. That does not automatically make them a property-owning bourgeoisie, nor does it validate your universal claim. Degeneration under pressure is not identical to surplus extraction as a ruling class.

Your rain-and-curtains analogy is embarrassing. Social systems aren’t weather. They operate under concrete historical forces. Treating imperialism, sanctions, invasion, and sabotage as background noise is textbook idealism.

Then you retreat into “communism vs socialism” hair-splitting to dodge counterexamples like the Paris Commune, where officials were recallable and paid worker wages, or early Soviet soviets and factory committees with income caps. These were explicit anti-elite mechanisms. They directly contradict your claim.

At this point the pattern is obvious: whenever concrete institutions don’t fit your thesis, you redefine “communism,” redefine “elite,” or redefine “surplus.” That isn’t analysis. It’s cope.

And your final pivot is telling: “no system works unless the world cooperates.” congratulations on discovering imperialism. Marxists begin with the reality of imperialism. You invoke it only to declare socialism impossible, while giving capitalism a pass despite it requiring global coercion just to function.

Now for the part where you really make yourself look ridiculous: you pretend you’re some “hard science” guy while dismissing historical and dialectical materialism. I have a bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD in STEM, alongside a master’s in Marxist theory. Socialist theory is not vibes or moral preference, it’s a systematic framework for analyzing class relations, production, surplus, and material conditions. You clearly don’t understand that method, yet you keep lecturing people who do. Liberal capitalism, by contrast, rests on idealist fairy tales about “human nature,” “markets,” and “incentives.”

At this point you’re either arguing in bad faith or you fundamentally don’t grasp basic political economy. Either way, this isn’t a serious exchange anymore. I’m done engaging with someone who substitutes semantic evasions and surface-level cynicism for material analysis.

You’re moving the goalposts. You started with “communism results in elites stealing surplus labor.” Now it’s “communism can’t prevent inequality” and “maybe there’s something outside capitalism and communism.” Pick a lane. Those are completely different claims. The original one is already falsified. In Cuba, the political class does not own production and surplus is routed through the state into healthcare, education, housing, and food subsidies under permanent siege. That is not capitalist surplus extraction. In Yugoslavia, workers’ councils directly controlled enterprises and surplus, your personal approval of worker self-management doesn’t magically make it irrelevant. In China under Mao Zedong, mass-line politics and collectivization explicitly targeted bureaucratic privilege (especially during the Cultural Revolution). In the Paris Commune, officials were recallable and paid worker wages. In the early Soviet Union, surplus was socialized through soviets and factory committees with formal income caps on officials. These are concrete institutional facts. None of this fits your original caricature of “a small elite stealing surplus labor.”

On Cuba: inequality exists. That is not evidence of a new exploiting class. The Cuban leadership does not privately own factories or land. Complaining about internal distribution while casually brushing aside six decades of blockade, sanctions, sabotage, and economic warfare is lazy. You’re treating Cuba like it developed in a vacuum. I hope you can see how patently ridiculous that is.

On China: you admit Mao-era redistribution was real, then dismiss it because inequality resurfaced later. Congratulations, you’ve just demonstrated that outcomes depend on material conditions, not some mystical communist essence. Also, China’s post-reform poverty reduction rested on Mao-era foundations: land nationalization, universal literacy, basic healthcare, and industrial infrastructure. Markets were layered on top of socialism, they didn’t replace it.

On the USSR: saying “attempts don’t matter, only outcomes” is historically illiterate. Institutions don’t appear fully formed, they evolve under civil war, invasion, famine, and international isolation. Ignoring that context while declaring socialism “powerless” is like judging a burned house without mentioning the arsonist.

And notice how far you’ve already retreated. Now you say communism doesn’t create elites, it just “can’t stop them.” That’s not what you originally claimed. Marxists have been writing for over a century about bureaucratic degeneration under scarcity and imperialist pressure. You’re not discovering anything new, you’re just refusing to engage with the material conditions that produce it.

Finally, since you want to posture: socialist theory is not vibes or moral preference. It’s a scientific framework (historical and dialectical materialism) built on analyzing class relations, production, surplus, and concrete conditions. You clearly don’t understand that method, yet you feel comfortable lecturing people who do. Liberalism and capitalism, by contrast, rely on idealist abstractions about “human nature,” “markets,” and “incentives.” That’s about as scientific as the Bible. If you actually want to contribute something meaningful, start by learning how material analysis works instead of recycling warmed-over liberal common sense and calling it insight.

The only exhausting thing here is your seemingly unlimited arrogance to lecture others on topics you don’t understand beyond surface level vibes and idealism.

I’m no scholar on the subject so grain of salt.

My understanding is that Greenland is highly isolated, extremely cold and has minimal sunshine hours which are known to have a negative impact.

Cuba? Yugoslavia? Mao-era China? Paris Commune? Spain in 1936? The early USSR?

In Cuba, large parts of the social surplus have long been distributed through universal systems rather than privately captured. In Yugoslavia, workers’ self-management gave enterprise councils real authority over production and surplus allocation. In China under Mao Zedong, mass-line politics and collectivization explicitly targeted bureaucratic privilege especially during the cultural revolution you likely demonize (even if that had its own major issues). In Paris (1871), officials were recallable and paid worker wages. In Soviet Union, the early revolutionary period featured soviets, factory committees, and formal attempts to cap official incomes and socialize surplus.

If you dismiss all of these, it starts to look less like analysis and more like bad faith. And your argument completely sidesteps the decisive factors, relentless external pressure from capitalist hegemony, war, blockade, sanctions, sabotage, plus the material limits of poor, devastated societies. Treating outcomes as if they emerged in a vacuum reeks of liberal idealism. That’s about as useful for understanding political economy as quoting scripture. What actually recurs historically is not some mystical law that “communism creates elites,” but bureaucratic pressures under siege and underdevelopment, concrete problems of socialist transition, not proof that surplus must end up in the hands of a new ruling class.

I would recommend you study some theory and learn to apply dialectical and historical materialism rather than wasting your time spreading malformed “analysis”.

You know nothing of China. Why go out of your way to talk like you do? China has a lower suicide rate than the world average and lower than the US and most of Europe.

Have you considered you get called dumb because “it is known” isn’t a valid argument outside of liberal spaces.

It’s not an adhominem also you can’t prove a negative the burden of proof is on you. You’re doing a Russell’s teapot. You have made a statement that is false with no evidence to back up your claim.

The setup of society isn’t radical in and of itself at least in the short to medium term , look at China, the USSR, Cuba, it’s simply the path to get there is one unfortunately of violence and struggle against those currently enforcing the capitalist order.

Cooperatives already exist that work at scale. Huawei is a form of Co-op. Outside of that you could keep everything the same just make ceo/management positions democratic within the company. Many solutions if you think about it for any amount of time.

I don’t think you know what imperialism means. Russia can and is bad without being imperialist. They may have imperial ambitions but that’s irrelevant to the now where they do not have the capacity to be imperialist. I wish people would stop trying to dilute the meaning of imperialism to just mean country doing war or big country doing thing I don’t like.

Honestly, I agree we should leave this here. You’re not engaging Marx’s body of work, you’re engaging in quote-stacking to defend a position that directly contradicts Marxism as a scientific framework. That’s the same method religious radicals use: isolate passages, abstract them from their material context, and retrofit them to a preconceived conclusion.

Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Chairman Mao all have writings on this. Marxism is grounded in dialectical and historical materialism, which leads to the opposite conclusion from what you’re arguing. Your position remains idealist, you start from abstract values (“humanism,” “autonomy,” “dignity”) and then try to read Marx backward through them. Marxism starts from material production, class relations, and social practice.

Emancipation is not a “liberal value.” Liberal values emerge from capitalism and express its internal logic. The system cannot be separated from its so-called ideals. The purpose of a system is what it actually does. Liberalism historically produced slavery, imperialism, enclosure, colonial genocide, and modern wage exploitation. “Autonomy” and “self-determination” are structurally impossible under liberalism, they are not its values, they are ideological justifications. The marxist project is to explain this contradiction, not spiritually redeem it.

You also misrepresent what I said about the individual and collective with the “cogs in a machine” framing. That’s liberal projection. Marxism does not erase individuality, it shows that individuality is socially produced and materially conditioned. The collective is not merely a neutral tool; it is the necessary foundation for any real individual development. Liberalism inverts this by treating society as secondary to an abstract subject.

Marx inherits dialectics from Hegel, but he decisively breaks with Hegel’s reconciliation of the individual with the bourgeois state. Hegel attempts to philosophically justify modern society. Marxism locates contradiction in material production and aims at abolishing bourgeois society altogether.

Marxism is not liberal humanism completed. Liberalism is bourgeois ideology. Communism is not the realization of liberal autonomy; it is the abolition of the social relations that made liberal autonomy necessary as an abstraction.

The problem with what you’re saying is that what you are calling liberalism’s “humanist core” is not something that ever existed independently of class power. Individual autonomy and self-determination under liberalism were always conditional on property, status, and imperial position. From its very inception, liberalism expanded alongside chattel slavery, colonial conquest, and the super-exploitation of the global South. That is not an accident or a betrayal of liberal values; it is how those values were historically instantiated. What you describe as a “seed of humanism” was in practice a humanist façade, autonomy for those of means, domination for everyone else.

Because of this, removing private property from liberal values does not “complete” liberalism; it dissolves it. Liberalism without private property, hyper-individualism, and abstract rights is no longer liberalism at all. It is something qualitatively different. Marx does not take liberal values and try to realize them more consistently; he explains why they arise under capitalism, why they take the abstract form they do, and why they systematically fail. He critiques, he does not inherit. Marx holding liberalism to its own standards is a method of exposure, not an endorsement of those standards as foundational.

Saying Marx’s work has liberalism as its “basis” confuses historical sequence with theoretical grounding. Liberalism emerges historically after feudalism; that does not make feudal ideology the core of liberal thought. In the same way, Marxism emerges after liberal capitalism; that does not make liberal values its foundation. Marx’s starting point is not Enlightenment ideals but material production, class relations, and the contradictions of political economy. Liberal categories appear in his work because they are the dominant ideological forms of bourgeois society, not because they are his normative anchors.

On the individual: Marx does not abolish individuality, but neither does he center it the way liberalism does. In Marxism, the individual is always socially constituted, and their development is subordinate to and dependent on collective conditions. Every major communist thinker after Marx is explicit on this point: the collective is primary, and individual flourishing follows from transformed social relations. Liberalism inverts this, treating society as a constraint on an already-formed individual. That difference is structural.

Finally, on idealism versus materialism: acknowledging that liberalism arose from material conditions does not make it materialist. Feudalism also arose from material conditions; that does not make the divine right of kings or the Mandate of Heaven materialist doctrines. Liberalism remains idealist because it treats ideas like rights, autonomy, and citizenship as primary and self-justifying, rather than as historically specific expressions of material relations. Marx’s point that ideas can become a material force once they grip the masses presupposes it. Ideas act materially because they are rooted in material conditions, not because they float free as universal values.

Marx did not derive his ideas on emancipation from liberalism’s promises. He explained why those promises existed, why they were necessarily hollow under capitalism, and why a completely different social foundation was required to move beyond them. Liberalism is the object of Marx’s critique, not the core of his worldview.

Also I never said Marx didn’t have guiding ideas they just weren’t liberal they were Hegelian.

There’s been a subtle shift in the conversation that’s worth flagging first. The discussion started out about liberal values being the basis of Marx’s work, but it’s now sliding into talking about historical achievements that occurred under liberalism. Those aren’t the same thing, and conflating them is what’s causing the confusion. I’m hoping clarifying that distinction will put the discussion back on track.

Marx does argue that certain historical developments associated with the bourgeois revolutions were real and necessary. The end of feudal bondage is the clearest example. But this wasn’t the realization of a liberal value in the abstract; it was the result of changing material conditions and class struggle, specifically the rising power of the bourgeoisie. Private property rights functioned as the ideological and legal form that allowed those new relations to consolidate themselves. The “achievement” flows from material forces, not from liberal ideals being progressively fulfilled.

The same applies to rationalism and similar developments. Rationalized law, administration, and production emerge because capitalism requires them, not because liberalism is steadily perfecting its values. Marx analyzes these phenomena to explain how capitalism works and why it historically replaces feudalism, not to endorse the liberal worldview that accompanies them.

The labor theory of value isn’t a liberal achievement at all. Marx takes it from classical political economy as a scientific tool in order to expose exploitation and demonstrate the limits of capitalism. There is nothing there to be “fully realized” under communism; it’s a means of critique, not a value.

Yes, liberal democracy has to be overthrown for genuine human emancipation, that doesn’t mean Marxism is the fulfillment of liberalism. Liberal values are ideological expressions of bourgeois class power; the historical achievements associated with liberalism arise from material conditions and class struggle.

The core of Marx work is dialectical and historical materialism from which all his analysis flows which is directly at odds with the idealism at the core of liberalism from which it gets it’s values.