Does hesitation mean something else where you live?

Steve Huffman commends you on upholding his moderation policy.

I take a very literal approach to “the state.” The state is the status quo. The way things currently are. The totality of social relations. The state is what keeps Haskell programmers awake at night. Nothing more, nothing less.

A hippie commune, an Anarchist book club, a Syndicalist federation, and a dictatorship of the proletariat helmed by a Communist party are all states. It isn’t very useful to argue about what is and isn’t a state. It is much more interesting to explore how these various forms of social organization differ in composition and outcome. To learn from effective practice, incorporate the triumphs of past movements, while avoiding the mistakes. Differing conditions call for differing tactics, and it doesn’t behoove anybody to be too dogmatic.

Can they delete this?

It is definitely inducing cognitive dissonance. The developers are simply are communists trying to collectivize social media, and that will live in their heads rent free as long as they stick around.

Capitalism was not inevitable. Feudalism could have just stagnated or died out. Capitalism is what ultimately resolved the contradictions of Feudalism and this happened over the course of centuries. Likewise, Socialism will resolve the contradictions of Capitalism (hopefully before life on Earth is doomed).

In Marx’s time, it was presumed that the most advanced centers of Capitalism would be the first to progress to Socialism, but historically this didn’t bear out. The Socialist revolution didn’t take place in England or Germany, but in Russia, which was a backwater by contemporary standards, barely letting go of serfdom. As a functionally feudal monarchy on Europe’s periphery, the bourgeois class of Russia was stunted, and this certainly played a role in their defeat. The vast majority of places we see revolutionary class struggle endure, from China to Korea to Cuba to Vietnam tend not to be the centers of industrial production (at least, at the times of their revolutions).

So you could say that countries like the USSR and China skipped past Capitalism, but only in a regional sense. It still remains as a world-hegemonic system which they have always been forced to contend with.

There is a tendency to deem revolution as impossible in the West, and rest all hope for the future on China. Regardless of whether China is blazing the trail towards Communism or not, this is an excuse for apathy and inaction. It is a form of de-politicization.