tankies: fledgling socialist states will be forced to compete with capitalist ones in the medium term

ultras: compete?? so you're just gonna naturalize capitalism like that

tankies: if you view all economic growth and even inter-state competition as proof of capitalism, you're the one naturalizing it!

ultras: socialism means no states

tankies: surely only workers' states can establish the economic preconditions for communism (which means no states)

ultras: "economic preconditions"?? nice stage theory, idiot. guess you never read marx's letter to vera zasulich

tankies: the whole point he's making there is that economic arrangements condition political possibilities, he's not saying "there's no such thing as necessary preconditions"

ultras: you sound just like steven pinker

tankies: attributing the success of e.g. china to capitalism makes *you* sound like steven pinker, whose error consists in conflating progress with capitalism

ultras: progress? no such thing my friend. also what success?

tankies: if lifting 800 million people out of poverty and throwing off colonial domination don't count as progress and success, then we aren't even speaking the same language

ultras: that's just imperialism

tankies: the way you define things, any poor country that dares challenge the global hegemony of the US will count as imperialist

ultras: facts don't care about your feelings. that's not socialism, it's just geopolitics. socialists should be aloof from that stuff

tankies: marx did not think that geopolitics and class struggle were two different spheres, he sought to explain the former by reference to the latter. your politics is a gnostic non-politics of withdrawal from the world.

ultras: sorry i understood capital

tankies: how do you propose to abolish the value-form?

ultras: *bunch of vague metaphors*

tankies: that's not a plan

ultras: i'm not interested in writing recipes for the cook-shops of the future. marx was not a marxist

tankies: he said that to distance himself from french ultras who thought that any progress short of full communism was impossible and undesirable, just like you do

ultras: nuh-uh