TBH I also think that feature can become it’s own problem too.
The Fediverse may be good at combating certain forms of enshittification(it’s too small right now to know for sure), but what qualifies as such can easily drift into ideological balkanization, purity testing, and arbitrary in-group/out-group policing…Which I already see happening here during my short stay.
And social networks thrive and grow on cross-community connectivity, discovery, and engagement, excessive ideological sorting and fragmentation then undermines that. That is a core contradiction in the Fediverse that I am not sure is easily reconciled.
Where the incentivizes toward that balkanizing also increases the risk of creating a network even more unfriendly or overwhelming to newcomers to navigate(ideological boundaries they didn’t create, didn’t consent to, and may not even understand), while risks decreasing broader political dialogue, coalition-building, and productive disagreement that makes town square social media what it is and not just a more convoluted Discord for messageboards.
This feels like it needs a semester more than a few paragraphs lol. But I will attempt to answer some of it to the best of my ability cause I think if nothing else it can be helpful cause almost everything you said here I come across all the time.
1.) Communism is an end goal strived for after achieving sufficient social and economic transformation, not something you simply enact by decree.
Socialism though, broadly speaking, is understood as a transitional process of transforming the institutions, property relations, and class structures inherited from capitalism into one that serves the proletariat as opposed to the capitalist class.
And developing those productive forces can take a myriad of forms, including managed capitalism.
This is actually one of the fundamental misconceptions I see people fall into constantly.
And that process will necessarily look different depending on a country’s historical circumstances, material conditions, level of economic development, and position within the global economy.
That’s why Marxism is fundamentally a materialist framework rather than a strict blueprint for organizing society. The goal isn’t to immediately abolish every market, private enterprise, or capitalist institution regardless of circumstances. It’s to transform the underlying class relations and develop the material conditions necessary to eventually transcend capitalism altogether.
2.) China and Russia are not really interchangeable beyond their relationship as adversaries to the US hegemonic order.
First, Russia doesn’t even claim to be communist anymore from what I read(maybe nostalgia for the USSR). The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and the Russian Federation that emerged underwent an enormously destructive process of capitalist restoration thanks to US shock therapy and Yeltsin’s government(which Putin comes out of). Which led to mass privatization and oligarchic consolidation. Putin’s Russia is an authoritarian capitalist state and the re-hardening of hostilities is it’s own chapter but the friction points came over perceived encroachment into it’s spheres of influence and economic protectionism America saw as acts of economic warfare.
China is a fundamentally different story, and the distinction is important because it goes directly to questions of class power and who ultimately controls the economy.
China has billionaires, private capitalists, wage labor, markets, and significant wealth inequality. That is all true
However, unlike Russia, where the post-Soviet transition transferred enormous amounts of public wealth into private hands and created a politically powerful oligarchic capitalist class, China’s proletarian revolution retained substantial state ownership of strategic industries, a state-controlled banking system, and a Communist Party that maintains ultimate political authority over private capital.
TLDR: Think of the words of lesser remembered founding father and first Supreme Court Justice John Jay:
This gets to the heart of what separates Russia and China’s relationship to capital, property, and who holds power in the state and who that state is designed to serve and preserve. And I often find it a bit frustrating cause a materialist understanding of Russia today is more like a sneak preview of America tomorrow than it is of anything to do with communism.
3.) So why even pretend to be Communist?
The theoretical justification behind the Great Leap Forward and then Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms was that China, emerging from centuries of imperial domination, war, and extreme underdevelopment, needed to develop its productive forces before it could construct a more advanced socialist economy. And that in order to survive as a nation had to be reflective of the broader global economy, geopolitical realities, and historical context they existed within.
And attempts to go against that were met with what places like Cuba, the USSR, and any number of other attempted socialist revolutions(or even just unaligned nations) experienced in terms of economic isolation, sanctions, embargoes, political destabilization, covert operations, military invasions etc.
Market dependency, foreign investment, private enterprise, and class dynamics were therefore treated as instruments of development rather than necessarily being incompatible with a socialist transition.
China considers itself to be in primitive socialism.
And i think there is a pretty passionate debate about whether some of the same capitalist relations used to develop productive forces also reproduce capitalist class interests, inequalities, and concentrations of economic power that may ultimately undermine the socialist transition itself.