Social democracy needs superprofits from the periphery to fund the core.

But there are social democratic parties in developing countries.

"I'm not a social democrat, I'm I democratic socialist, look at these social democrat countries I support!"

Could you please try a little harder

Democratic socialism doesn’t eliminate private ownership the way communism does, people can still get rich, own companies, and buy jet skis

No, you're describing social democracy.

Democratic socialism combines political democracy with public, cooperative or state ownership of key industries while maintaining elections, civil liberties and pluralism.

No, that's socialism

They're using the terms wrong, don't worry that you can't follow; they're not being consistent

Thank you. I am interested to learn more.

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.

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).

The label shift was a survival tactic

Fair, but why can't social democracy function in a peripheral (=developing?) country?

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.

If a developing country invests in public education, free healthcare, transport infrastructure, housing, etc., is that not social democracy? Why wouldn't that work?

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.

If material conditions are all that shapes ideas, why are you speaking ideas at me? Either you are incorrect or you are wasting your time, and I don't think you're wasting your time.

In a world where ideas don't matter, either of us working against our class interests through ignorance is incoherent. If we can be deceived to act against our class interests to change material conditions to serve the rich, then ideas can change material conditions.

People can interpret their interests different ways. People can ally themselves with specific groups but not others. People can have different levels of risk aversion. People can be affected by propaganda and charisma. Ideas skew praxis skews the development of material conditions.

Neglect this at your own peril. Use it to make fairy tales come true.

To conflate proletarian dictatorship with bourgeois state power is to erase the question of class content.

What class attributes do the authorities in the vanguard have in common with the proletariat?

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.

So you made a straw man of what I was saying. There are degrees of freedom in how material relations are shaped which can be chosen between by a revolutionary movement.

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.

Feudalism did not primarily maintain its classes through ownership either. Like a feudal lord, an administrator primarily maintains their position by social maneuvers towards their near-peers. Justifying bad metrics as unavoidable while claiming responsibility for windfalls, shaping their domain to play better within these social dynamics, and sabotaging rivals who don't fit in their narrative.

Unlike feudal lords, administrators don't own a personal demesne, but for the most powerful feudal lords that demesne was miniscule compared to their power base that came from vassalage. A feudal lord conquering a rival kingdom would distribute it to loyal vassals like an administrator cannibalizing a rival ministry would distribute it to loyal managers.

In this game, administrators want to increase authority over their domain of responsibility to better weaponize it. Modes of production are turned towards political usefulness for the administrator rather than towards the benefit of workers, alienating workers in the process.

Simply put, authority becomes a form of control over the means of production which shapes an administrator's class incentives differently from workers. It isn't ownership but it doesn't need to be.

And yes, administrator roles do tend to be leveraged into nepotistic inheritance of authority, with family being appointed to higher roles in exchange for favors.

No straw man. You said mode of production is a “choice” and solidarity comes down to “interpretation.” That’s putting ideas in the driver’s seat. If you want to soften that now, fine. But don’t rewrite what you said and call it misreading. Degrees of freedom exist, but they exist inside hard limits. Movements don’t invent new material conditions by thinking hard enough, they work through contradictions they actually inherit.

On feudalism, you’re stripping out the core of what made it feudal. Lords didn’t just maneuver socially. Their power rested on land, and on peasants being tied to that land. That’s how surplus was extracted. Vassalage was a political expression of that underlying relation, not a substitute for it. If you take away control over land and surplus, you’re not describing feudalism anymore, you’re just using the aesthetic of it.

With administrators you’re doing the same thing, collapsing authority into ownership. They’re not the same. Authority that can’t be turned into private property, sold off, or passed down as a right is conditional. A feudal lord could hand land to his heir. An administrator can’t hand a factory to their kid. If they start acting like they can, that’s not proof that authority magically equals a class. It’s a sign something in the system is breaking down, and the question becomes why, materially.

You’re right that bureaucrats can game systems, build networks, sideline rivals. None of that is controversial. But describing behaviour isn’t the same as identifying a class. You keep jumping from “they consolidate influence” to “therefore they are a class,” without showing the property relation that would actually make that true.

Even the well documented idea of a “new bourgeoisie” emerging isn’t a blank cheque for your argument. It’s a warning about a process, not a claim that any layer with authority already is one. There’s a difference between a contradiction that has to be managed and a fully formed class that reproduces itself through ownership. If every exercise of coordination produced a new ruling class, then no collective project would ever be possible and we should all just give up and kill ourselves now.

On nepotism, same issue. Favouritism exists in almost every system ever. That alone doesn’t define a class. For it to do that, those positions have to become something like property, stable, transferable, independently reproducible. If that happens, then yes, you’re looking at a real shift. If not, you’re still dealing with a deviation inside a different structure.

You’re not wrong to be wary of authority. Nobody serious ignores that problem. But right now you’re treating suspicion as if it’s analysis, and it isn’t. Analysis asks what the underlying relations are, who actually controls production, how surplus is allocated, whether positions can turn into property. Without that, you’re just pointing at hierarchy and filling in the rest by analogy and vibes.

Ownership is a social construct like any other. Limiting your intepretation of class to ones defined by ownership makes the analysis pointlessly inapplicable when looking at societies where ownership plays less of a role. Feudal society didn't just have lords and serfs, it also had peasants and free cities and church land that don't fit the "feudalism is defined by owning the land and the serfs on it" schema. Theocracy, bureaucracy, caste systems, white supremacy, patriarchy, and anarchy all benefit from a class-based lens.

Marx focused on ownership as the primary class divide because that's how capitalism works (especially in the 19th century before social liberalism muddied the waters through pension funds, unemployment benefits, small business loans, etc.), but any conflict of interests between groups of people seeking to achieve economic prosperity will do. For example, migrant workers are actively imported under liberalism to divide the working class, which was so succesful not just because of racism but because of genuinely different economic incentives between those with citizenship privileges and those who are floundering in a hostile legal system but for who what little they get is more than they could have gotten back in the imperial periphery. In essence, citizenship becomes the division between two distinct working classes.

And here we see how solidarity is a matter of interpretation. Right-wing citizen workers attempt solidarity with capitalists by invoking their shared citizenship while left-wing citizen workers attempt solidarity with the migrants by invoking their shared worker status. These are different strategies that are both within range of what the material conditions make plausible. One hopes to reinforce imperial oppression, creating the material conditions that can be leveraged into greater citizenship privileges as traitors to the international working class; the other hopes to leverage the power of a united labor front grants either to demand more privileges at the negotiating table (socialist reformers) or to have a revolution whose reorganisation leaves them better off than before.

I wish I could say for certain that being traitors to the international working class is a foolishly bad bet. But it worked okay for western workers in the past century. I truly can't say if a median income middle aged white male American would expect less prosperity under Trump than in the conflicting mess that would be an American leftist revolution.

Those in power have similar choices between mutually contradictory strategies, reshaping material conditions in different uncertain ways. In 2015-2024, the USAmerican capital class was divided between going full hog dictatorial fascism and trying to reform through the slow decline of their empire. Neither is objectively better for the US capital class; they both have different risk profiles, and fascism is a big enough swing that it can't be hedged against very well. If the US collapses, billionaires may well end up being hunted down and killed, which is worse for them than becoming multi-millionaires in a world where China is the dominant nation.

"Ownership is a social construct like any other. Limiting your interpretation of class to ones defined by ownership makes the analysis pointlessly inapplicable..."

Waving away ownership because it’s a “social construct” is a dodge. Money is a social construct. Borders are a social construct. Wage labour is a social construct. That doesn’t make them less real. It means they are historically produced relations with force behind them, backed by law, coercion, and everyday practice. Saying “it’s just a construct” doesn’t dissolve its material power. It just sounds radical while avoiding the actual analysis.

"Feudal society didn't just have lords and serfs, it also had peasants and free cities and church land that don't fit the 'feudalism is defined by owning the land and the serfs on it' schema."

This is just wrong. Land was the dominant means of production in feudal society. Control over land structured the relation between kings, nobles, and peasants. Surplus was extracted through that control and the labour bound to it. The church owned land. Free cities operated within and around that land-based order. Their existence doesn’t negate the core relation. Complexity at the edges doesn’t erase the structure.

"Theocracy, bureaucracy, caste systems, white supremacy, patriarchy, and anarchy all benefit from a class-based lens."

You’re mixing levels of analysis. Patriarchy, white supremacy, caste, these are real, oppressive social relations. They shape labour, reproduction, access to resources, and state power. But they are not classes in themselves. They intersect with class. They are used to divide, organise, and reproduce class relations. Analysing them alongside class is necessary. Collapsing them into class blurs what each actually does. A concept that covers everything ends up explaining nothing.

"Marx focused on ownership as the primary class divide because that's how capitalism works... but any conflict of interests between groups of people seeking to achieve economic prosperity will do."

No. If any conflict of interests counts as class, then the term loses all precision. Tenants and landlords, yes. But also senior and junior staff, rival departments, urban and rural voters. Once every patterned antagonism becomes “class,” you can’t distinguish primary contradictions from secondary ones. You can’t explain why some conflicts reproduce across generations while others shift or disappear. Class has explanatory force because it’s tied to production and surplus, not just any difference in incentives. Are green energy execs and fossil fuel execs different classes? Obviously not.

"For example, migrant workers are actively imported under liberalism to divide the working class... citizenship becomes the division between two distinct working classes."

Migrant and citizen workers can have different immediate incentives. Legal status, deportability, access to welfare, all of that matters. But both still sell their labour power. Both are still exploited by capital. The asymmetry exists but it’s a division within a single class, actively produced because it weakens collective power. That’s why it works. Not because it creates two classes, but because it fractures one.

"And here we see how solidarity is a matter of interpretation."

There is no solidarity between worker and owner. That’s not a matter of interpretation, it’s a material relation. One sells labour power. The other extracts surplus. Appeals to shared citizenship, nation, or race are ideological tools to obscure that antagonism, not resolve it.

Right-wing workers aligning with capital aren’t exercising some free interpretive choice in a vacuum. They’re being pulled into a politics that reflects their uneven position within imperialism, short-term advantage in exchange for long-term subordination. That isn’t solidarity. It’s a cross-class "alliance", and those always break when it matters.

When profits fall, when crisis hits, the “shared citizenship” story disappears overnight. Layoffs, wage cuts, austerity, the owner’s loyalty to the nation ends exactly where accumulation begins. That’s the reality underneath the rhetoric.

This isn’t about blaming workers. It’s about explaining why this politics has traction. Imperialism redistributes enough surplus to sections of the core workforce to distort consciousness. That’s real, but it’s unstable and conditional. The moment that flow tightens, the underlying antagonism reasserts itself.

So no, solidarity isn’t a matter of interpretation. It’s grounded in position. People can misread their interests, sure. They can be won to chauvinism or reformism. But those interpretations only stick because of material conditions, and they only last as long as those conditions hold. Real solidarity has to be built on shared relation to production and shared interest in ending exploitation. Anything else is temporary alignment at best.

"Those in power have similar choices between mutually contradictory strategies... Neither is objectively better for the US capital class..."

Factions within capital do choose strategies. But they don’t choose freely. They respond to crisis tendencies, falling profitability, geopolitical pressure, labour unrest. Finance, tech, energy, they have overlapping but not identical interests. That doesn’t mean there’s no structure. It means class rule is contested internally.

Those strategies aren’t proof that ideas escape material limits. They’re proof that ruling classes adapt under pressure.

The deeper issue here is analytical. You want a framework flexible enough to absorb every pattern you see. That feels sophisticated because it acknowledges complexity. But it quietly drops the hard part, distinguishing structure from expression, primary from secondary contradictions, class from layer.

Once “class” means any durable conflict of interest, everything becomes class. Every hierarchy, every incentive split. At that point you’re not explaining anything, you’re just renaming it.

You’re using “class” as a catch-all. I’m using it in the stricter sense that actually lets you explain things, relation to production, control of surplus, reproduction of power. That’s what gives the concept teeth.

And the political implication of your position is pretty dark, whether you mean it or not. If every exercise of authority or unevenness in incentives is already the seed of a new ruling class, then organised transformation becomes impossible by definition. Any revolution complex enough to survive would already contain the embryo of its own betrayal and again we should just give up and kill ourselves now.

Waving away ownership because it’s a “social construct” is a dodge.

I am not waving it away, I am lowering its status to be within the same realm as concerns that are secondary in capitalism. Concerns that may become primary when capital is undone, as in state communism.

You’re using “class” as a catch-all. I’m using it in the stricter sense that actually lets you explain things, relation to production, control of surplus, reproduction of power. That’s what gives the concept teeth.

And all of these can continue to be monopolized by a specific societal subgroup without the use of "ownership". Any group with authority over these matters that can have solidarity within the authoritative group will serve as a ruling class that gains from exploiting the working class.

So no, solidarity isn’t a matter of interpretation. It’s grounded in position. People can misread their interests, sure. They can be won to chauvinism or reformism. But those interpretations only stick because of material conditions, and they only last as long as those conditions hold. Real solidarity has to be built on shared relation to production and shared interest in ending exploitation. Anything else is temporary alignment at best.

The relation to production of different groups change over time. Serfdom, slavery, automation. Worldwide alignment of workers' interests is temporary and shifting like intranational alignment, which is why it historically hasn't happened yet.

If the singular working class as a concept had more teeth than nationality I would expect it to, well, take a bigger bite out of history. For French revolutionaries to abolish slavery in their natural solidarity with other workers rather than continuing exploitation because their interests did not in fact align with slaves in the colonies.

If every exercise of authority or unevenness in incentives is already the seed of a new ruling class, then organised transformation becomes impossible by definition. Any revolution complex enough to survive would already contain the embryo of its own betrayal and again we should just give up and kill ourselves now.

No, we should become anarchist. Unevenness is a vulnerability that we build social structures to prevent from turning into authority, and complex social structures with far less authority already exist from sociocracy to decentralized guerilla cells.

As with your narrative of state communism, these systems are imperfect and will develop places of authority and abuse, and we will learn from that and alter the systems to be less authoritative.

But where you expect administrators to make such improvements to their personal and (sub)class' detriment, anarchy keeps the power to make these changes with the people so the changes are made in the people's favor.

We are able to be anarchist (or state communist) even within capitalism; the countless seeds of authority we carry with us into the postrevolutionary society will be far easier to wrangle than the full-grown monstrosities of capitalism.

"I am not waving it away, I am lowering its status to be within the same realm as concerns that are secondary in capitalism."

You can't just decide ownership matters less after capitalism by fiat. That's idealism. Ownership isn't a preference. It's the material anchor of class power. The point of proletarian state power isn't to wish authority away. It's to use authority to socialize production, break imperial chains, and create the conditions where class distinctions become obsolete. You don't get there by lowering the status of property relations. You get there by transforming them.

"Any group with authority over these matters that can have solidarity within the authoritative group will serve as a ruling class that gains from exploiting the working class."

This conflates function with class. Yes, bureaucrats can degenerate. That's a real contradiction. Mao wrote extensively about the risk of a "new bourgeoisie" emerging from within the party. But the solution isn't to abandon proletarian authority. It's to deepen mass line, criticism-self-criticism, recall mechanisms. The AES experiences show that proletarian authority can break imperial dependency, socialize surplus, and expand human development. That isn't authority becoming a class. That's authority being wielded to transform the conditions that make class possible.

"If the singular working class as a concept had more teeth than nationality I would expect it to, well, take a bigger bite out of history. For French revolutionaries to abolish slavery..."

The French Revolution was a bourgeois revolution. Of course bourgeois revolutionaries didn't abolish colonial slavery out of "solidarity." That proves the class character of that revolution, not the impossibility of proletarian internationalism. The Paris Commune, the Bolsheviks, the Chinese revolution, the Vietnamese revolution, the Cuban revolution, these show proletarian internationalism in practice. It's uneven, contradictory, contested. But it exists. And it exists because imperialism creates a shared enemy, not because workers spontaneously feel nice to each other.

"No, we should become anarchist... complex social structures with far less authority already exist from sociocracy to decentralized guerilla cells."

"Anarchism"(I've read anarchist theory and debated principled anarchists; in practice, when faced with real revolutionary tasks (smashing the bourgeois state, defending against counter-revolution, coordinating production at scale) they end up adopting positions functionally close to MLs, because material conditions demand it. The "authority is inherently tyrannical" line is tyranny of bedtime idealism that collapses on contact with actual struggle.) treats authority as the problem. But authority isn't the problem. Class power is. You can't dismantle the bourgeois state with decentralized cells. You can't break imperial chains with sociocracy. The material task of revolution is to seize state power, socialize production, and defend the revolution against counter-revolution. That requires coordination, discipline, and yes, authority. "Anarchism's" refusal to confront this is why it has repeatedly failed when faced with real revolutionary situations.

"But where you expect administrators to make such improvements to their personal and (sub)class' detriment, anarchy keeps the power to make these changes with the people..."

This sounds good but is abstract. Who are "the people"? How do they coordinate at scale? How do they defend against counter-revolution, imperial invasion, economic sabotage? The mass line is a method for tying leadership to the masses through concrete practice. But it requires a vanguard, a party, a state form capable of wielding power. "Anarchism's" distrust of all authority leaves it unable to answer these questions.

"We are able to be anarchist (or state communist) even within capitalism..."

You can build prefigurative spaces under capitalism. That's great, but prefiguration isn't revolution. The bourgeois state won't be voted away or out-organized by parallel structures. It has to be smashed. And what replaces it has to be capable of holding power, not just avoiding it.

You see authority as inherently dangerous, so you want to minimize it. I see authority as a social relation, so I ask: which class wields it, for what end, and with what mechanisms to prevent ossification? One approach leads to moralism. The other leads to strategy.

You are mixing social democrats with democratic socialists.

The origin and core of social democracy is clearly socialist and, in many cases, Marxist. Of course this was more and more deluted over time until today, were many social democratic parties have indeed completely abandoned their socialist roots even in theory.

However, historically, social democracy overall can (and imo should) still be seen as reformist socialism, at least partially. The way I see it, it's that the parties have abandoned social democracy by embracing neo-liberalism. have abandened those goals completely (e.g. modern German SPD, British Labour)

One could also argue that social democratic parties pretty much always had a leftist wing and a liberal wing, this is true today as well for the most part.

Its niceties are financed by imperial rent.

Isn't everything/anything existing under capitalism financed by imperial rent?

How is it different to China, for example, who also participates in the global capitalist economy and benefits from it?

When that flow contracts, the mask comes off.

When has this happened? Do you have a specific example of a social democratic party turning fascist (actually curious)? Turning neo-liberal, sure, but to me at least, equating neo-liberalism with fascism is an oversimplification. Or is the argument that socdem turns into neo-liberalism, neo-liberalism turns into fascism, ergo socdem=fascism?

>I explicitly said “helped,” not “solely responsible.” Multiple factors converged in 1933.

Fair enough.

they preserved the bourgeois state apparatus after 1918.

they kept the reactionary judiciary, the imperial officer corps, and the bureaucratic machinery intact. They unleashed the Freikorps on the KPD.

Whether or not you believe me, it does pain me to defend the SPD, but I guess I will still do it.

They didn't just preserve it, they were essential in building it. And that shouldn’t be surprising since in their view, socialism has to be build through a liberal democratic system instead of going straight from imperialist/monarchist to socialist.

And yes, they did a lot of “ultra-pragmatic” and desperate moves to protect the liberal republic and what was in their view the way towards socialism in the future and avoid a civil war/reversal of their gains. This does include them using Freikorps, which is imo indefensible, but it is at least somewhat explainable given the uncertainity of the situation.

And it's easy to judge in hindsight, but the German situation was quite different from Russia. There were uprisings all over the place, socialist republics were declared, but it was much more chaotic and the working class was much more divided. Chances of right wing and monarchists forces reversing power or even taking back more power seemed plausable.

>They refused every proposal for a united working class front against the Nazis.

This is very critical and one of the biggest issues. But again, this was a mutual thing. The KPD also refused to form any kind of front against the nazis until it was too late. Both factions failed to see nazism/fascism severely underestimated the threat of the fascists.

>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."

And this characterization is in part what made it virtually impossible to form any kind of pragmatic alliance/front against the fascists and I honestly don’t understand what the purpose of this characterization is.. Why would they work with the SPD against the fascists when the SPD was, in practice, fascist itself?

social democracy functions as the left wing of counterrevolution.

Social democracy is against revolution and pro reform. If that makes it fascist, literally everything and everyone except for revolutionary socialists are/were fascists. This worldview, imo, is shooting yourself in the foot. And I don’t understand why this view still seems to be held. Many have no issue with critial support of regimes/groups/factions for specific and pragmatic goals. And then we don't live in Weihmar Germany anymore, there is virtually 0 revolutionary potential in the west, so what good does essentially turning virtually everyone into the enemy do?

The origin and core of social democracy is clearly socialist and, in many cases, Marxist.

Social democracy's practice has always been the administration of capitalism. The Second International's collapse in 1914 proved this materially: when imperialist war arrived, they chose nation over class. Democratic socialists on the other hand may hold socialist aims in theory, however utopian. Social democrats do not. Their program accepts capitalist property relations as permanent. Their project is the rationalization of exploitation, not its abolition: distributing a portion of imperial superprofits to the labor aristocracy of the core to stabilize the system. This is not reformist socialism but capitalist management.

Isn't everything/anything existing under capitalism financed by imperial rent? How is it different to China, for example?

The mechanism matters. The Nordic welfare state (the alleged shining example of modern social democracy) is financed by extractive capital operating in the periphery. Swedish and Norwegian firms control mines across Africa that extract cobalt, copper, and rare earths under conditions replicating colonial relations. This creates a material basis for class collaboration at home. China's path is the inverse. China was subjected to imperial plunder for a century. The revolution under Chairman Mao broke that dependency and built an independent industrial base. Today China offers an alternative development path to the periphery through initiatives like the Belt and Road, free of IMF conditionalities and enforced dependency. That is anti-imperialist practice, not imperial rent extraction.

When has this happened? Do you have a specific example of a social democratic party turning fascist?

The argument is not that social democrats literally become out and out fascists. It is that their function in crisis serves fascism. The mask depends on surplus flow. Look at Labour in the UK today. Under Starmer, they are indistinguishable from the Tories they replaced. As imperial rent shrinks, austerity and class defense move to the forefront. They back arms deals, enforce anti-union laws, and cut public services. Across Europe, social democratic parties capitulate as the far right rises. In Germany, the SPD presides over rearmament and welfare cuts. In France, the PS collapses while Macron's center holds. In Sweden, social democrats adopt anti-immigrant positions to chase right-wing voters. Social Democracys niceties are financed by imperial plunder. When that flow shrinks, it defaults to open class defense. It is not identical to fascism, but it is the bridge: austerity dismantles the welfare compromise, creating the social desperation fascism exploits.

They didn't just preserve it, they were essential in building it... it is at least somewhat explainable given the uncertainty of the situation.

"Explainable". The SPD's choice to build a liberal republic rather than smash the bourgeois state was a class choice, not a historical accident. They did not face a binary of "chaos or Weimar." They faced a choice: side with the proletarian masses who had just toppled the Kaiser, or side with the generals, judges, and bureaucrats who served capital. They chose the latter. The Ebert-Groener pact was alignment. Using the Freikorps against the KPD while negotiating with monarchists was not a tragic error. It was clear cut counterrevolution.

This is very critical and one of the biggest issues. But again, this was a mutual thing. The KPD also refused to form any kind of front against the nazis until it was too late.

The refusal was not symmetric. The SPD held state power. They controlled the police, the courts, the army. They used that power to repress communist organizing while tolerating fascist mobilization. The KPD, by contrast, had no state apparatus. Their sectarianism was a tactical failure. The SPD's collaboration with bourgeois forces was a strategic orientation. One error could have been corrected. The other was structural.

And this characterization is in part what made it virtually impossible to form any kind of pragmatic alliance/front against the fascists... Why would they work with the SPD against the fascists when the SPD was, in practice, fascist itself?

Stalin's characterization was not the cause of the split. It was the summation of material practice. The SPD had already shown, in 1919, 1920, and 1923, that they would use state violence against proletarian organizations before allying against them with the far right. The KPD's analysis recognized that a united front requires mutual trust. The SPD had forfeited that trust through their actions. The purpose of the characterization was clarity: you cannot build a front with a force that views your destruction as a precondition for stability. History confirmed that the SPD's priority was preserving the bourgeois order, not stopping fascism. That is why the "moderate wing of fascism" label stuck it is an accurate descriptor.

Many have no issue with critial support of regimes/groups/factions for specific and pragmatic goals

Critical support is possible when goals align against a principal enemy. We support Russia and Iran against imperialist aggression not because they are socialist, but because their resistance weakens the imperial core. No such alignment exists with social democrats. Their entire project is to blunt the teeth of capital at home in order to suck dry any revolutionary potential of the proletariat. They bribe sections of the working class with concessions financed by imperial plunder to enforce a false sense of class consciousness. They are enemies through and through, just like the neoliberals and the fascists. Recognizing this is not sectarianism. It is clarity. What shoot any movement in the foot is not recognizing the enemy.

Social democracy is against revolution and pro reform. If that makes it fascist, literally everything and everyone except for revolutionary socialists are/were fascists.

The definition is not "against revolution equals fascist." The definition is material: which class interest does a force serve in the decisive moment? Social democracy serves capital. When the system is stable, it administers concessions. When the system is threatened, it defends property by force. That function is what Stalin termed the moderate wing of fascism. This worldview does not turn everyone into an enemy. It identifies the enemy correctly. The West's low revolutionary potential today is precisely the result of social democracy's historical success in channeling proletarian energy into parliamentary dead ends. Abandoning class analysis to chase broader alliances does not build power. It dissolves it.

Ownership isn’t a preference. It’s the material anchor of class power.

Why do you think only ownership can be a "material anchor"? When someone can "own" something they've never been within a thousand miles of, why couldn't another form of institutionally enforced authority over that object fulfill that same role?

But the solution isn’t to abandon proletarian authority. It’s to deepen mass line, criticism-self-criticism, recall mechanisms.

You reformist! ;)

Why would regulation offer any more resistance against the pressure of material relations between authority and worker within state communism than in liberal capitalism?

they end up adopting positions functionally close to MLs, because material conditions demand it. The “authority is inherently tyrannical” line is tyranny of bedtime idealism that collapses on contact with actual struggle

It's natural that functions converge when pursuing the same goals, especially when the pressure is on. Pulling someone out of the way of a moving bus is going to look the same in all ideologies.

It's also natural that when you ask someone raised in a statist society what they would do, they're going to be primed to answer in a more centralized way. One of the nice things of anarchy is that other people can exercise their better ideas, so even if I give a bad answer they are free to give a good answer and people can go with that instead. That's how you prevent beginner mistakes like the four pests campaign or the holodomor from killing millions of people.

You can’t dismantle the bourgeois state with decentralized cells.

You can if you want primitivism, but yeah dying of smallpox sucks. That's why anarchists prefigure structures, as you note.

You can’t break imperial chains with sociocracy.

Why couldn't you?

As I mentioned before, the below are just my personal guesses of what would be good options. Anarchist society is larger than me and will do better than me.

Who are “the people”?

Everyone, with those who can't communicate effectively being assisted to have a say.

How do they coordinate at scale?

Sociocracy, federations, and whatever else they come up with and consent to.

How do they defend against counter-revolution

Shaping the material conditions towards decentralization and voluntary association, so there is nothing for the counterrevolution to seize.

imperial invasion

Shaping the material conditions to make places as hard as possible to hold with force, and the prevent the existence of strategic positions for the empire to hold. Decentralization, guerilla defense infrastructure, weapons caches. Mass solidarity. Propagandize among the invader's population and encourage revolution and resistance there.

economic sabotage?

Decentralized local production. Long-lasting repairable goods. Living within your ecological means.

Perhaps to help make these ideas more concrete we could have drills/competitions where different communes or federations showcase the strategies they think work best so groups can share and learn empirically.

"Why do you think only ownership can be a 'material anchor'? When someone can 'own' something they've never been within a thousand miles of, why couldn't another form of institutionally enforced authority over that object fulfill that same role?"

Ownership isn't about physical proximity. It's about the right to exclude, to appropriate surplus, to transfer control. That's what makes it a material anchor. Institutional authority without that right is conditional. A manager can direct labour, but if they can't sell the factory, bequeath it, or pocket the profit, they aren't a capitalist. That distinction, as has been pointed out already, is the difference between a function and a class.

"You reformist! ;) Why would regulation offer any more resistance against the pressure of material relations between authority and worker within state communism than in liberal capitalism?"

Mass line, criticism-self-criticism, recall mechanisms aren't liberal reforms. They're tools to keep proletarian authority tied to the class it serves. The AES have used them, imperfectly but materially, to prevent bureaucratic ossification. That's not reformism. It's simply recognizing that contradiction doesn't disappear after revolution. It has to be managed through practice, not wished away. And let's be clear: these tools work because the dictatorship of the proletariat has an objective interest in aligning leadership with the masses. The dictatorship of capital has the opposite aim. Its core function is to reproduce exploitation. No amount of "recall mechanisms" will make a bourgeois state serve workers, because its class character is defined by serving capital. You can't reform a class enemy into an ally.

"It's natural that functions converge when pursuing the same goals, especially when the pressure is on."

Exactly. Material conditions demand certain forms. That's proof that strategy must be grounded in reality, not moral preference. If anarchists end up adopting ML positions when faced with real tasks (smashing the state, defending the revolution, coordinating production) that says something about those ML positions. They are proven correct by practice.

"One of the nice things of anarchy is that other people can exercise their better ideas, so even if I give a bad answer they are free to give a good answer and people can go with that instead. That's how you prevent beginner mistakes like the four pests campaign or the holodomor from killing millions of people."

This is historical illiteracy. First, the "beginner mistakes" line erases the material conditions those revolutions faced: invasion, embargo, sabotage, famine imposed from outside. Second, it ignores that anarchist experiments have their own body counts when they fail to coordinate defense or production. Third, it pretends the AES didn't learn, adapt, and save hundreds of millions from imperial predation. The PRC lifted nearly a billion people out of poverty, built world-class infrastructure, and broke imperial dependency. That's a historical achievement under nearly impossible conditions not to mind the USSR going from illiterate peasants to space faring in under 50 years.

And the "let others try their better ideas" approach sounds open but is functionally irresponsible. Revolution isn't a laboratory. People die when strategy fails. The mass line isn't about letting everyone do their own thing. It's about synthesizing mass experience into coherent strategy through disciplined practice.

"You can't break imperial chains with sociocracy. Why couldn't you?"

Show me where it has shown even the slightest potential to. Imperialism doesn't care about your decision-making model. It bombs, sanctions, coups. Breaking imperial chains requires coordinated political power, economic planning, and military defense. That requires authority. Decentralization without central coordination isn't a strength. If anything it's a massive weakness begging to be exploited.

"Shaping the material conditions towards decentralization and voluntary association, so there is nothing for the counterrevolution to seize."

This is magical thinking. Counter-revolution doesn't need a central office to seize. It needs discontent, scarcity, external backing. Imperial invasion doesn't require a capital city to target. It requires weakness to exploit. Defense requires logistics, intelligence, strategy. That means coordination, discipline, authority.

"Everyone, with those who can't communicate effectively being assisted to have a say."

Abstract universalism ignores concrete contradictions. Who decides what "effective communication" means? How are conflicting interests adjudicated? How is surplus allocated when not everyone's needs can be met equally?

"Decentralized local production. Long-lasting repairable goods. Living within your ecological means."

All good things in theory. But imperialism doesn't respect local autarky. It enforces dependency through debt, trade, force. Breaking that requires collective power at scale. And let's be concrete: decentralized, uncoordinated production cannot manufacture modern technology. Computer chips, phones, advanced medicine, modern weapons, none of it happens in isolated communes. Kneecapping yourself technologically in the face of a hegemonic aggressor is suicidal at best. And we're back to fuck the ill and disabled if your model can't produce the medicine and equipment they need to survive.

"Perhaps to help make these ideas more concrete we could have drills/competitions where different communes or federations showcase the strategies they think work best so groups can share and learn empirically."

Prefigurative practice has value. But revolution isn't a showcase. It's a life-and-death struggle against a ruthless enemy.

The core disagreement remains simple. You see authority as inherently dangerous, so you want to minimize it. I see authority as a social relation, so I ask: which class wields it, for what end, and with what mechanisms to prevent ossification? One approach leads to moralism. The other leads to strategy. But to be blunt: your "anarchist" vision is idealist fantasy in the face of hegemonic violence. Imperialism doesn't negotiate with your decision-making model. It crushes what it can't co-opt. Material conditions don't care about your preferences. They only respond to power which you fear rather than understand.