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.

The Zionist special.

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.

That makes sense so in this case it was a mix of the environment and personal connection leading to a twisted understanding

Unfortunately not unusual for people to have warped views of China and Chinese matters even in leftist spaces often due to personal or environmental reasons.

“Taiwan” in its current political form is the unresolved remnant of a defeated reactionary regime, preserved by imperialist intervention. It is not a neutral “society that drifted away,” but a Cold War client structure built to block the completion of the Chinese revolution. Most of your arguments quietly erase that history.

“The CPC would have full legitimacy if they took out the KMT before they could oppress the people living in Taiwan at the time.”

This ignores a central fact: the CPC did not “choose” to stop at the strait. In 1950, the PLA was preparing for Taiwan operations when the US intervened directly via the Seventh Fleet after the outbreak of the Korean War. That intervention froze the civil war and militarily guaranteed the survival of the KMT regime. This is not speculation; it is openly acknowledged US policy. Without that intervention, the ROC state on Taiwan would not exist. Blaming the CPC for not completing reunification while ignoring US naval containment is ahistorical.

“The people of Taiwan really have zero relation to the CPC.”

The CPC is not a bloodline or a cultural club. It is the ruling party of the Chinese state that emerged from a popular revolution. “Relation” here is political and historical, not sentimental. The majority population of Taiwan is Han Chinese (with roots generally in Fujian) whose families largely arrived during Ming–Qing settlement or with the KMT retreat. Their language, kinship networks, religious practices, and economic ties are overwhelmingly Chinese. That does not obligate them to “like” the CPC, but it does make the claim of “zero relation” incoherent.

More importantly, this argument quietly treats the KMT state and it’s successors as the natural representative of Taiwan’s people, when in reality it was a settler regime imposed under martial law for nearly four decades, during which Taiwanese political identity was violently suppressed. The DPP did not emerge from some ancient Taiwanese nation; it emerged from contradictions within that ROC structure.

“‘Taiwanese are Chinese’ I guess they own Vancouver now?”

This is a category error. No serious CPC argument claims sovereignty based on ethnicity alone. The PRC’s claim is based on state succession and territorial continuity: Taiwan was returned to China after Japan’s defeat (Cairo and Potsdam Declarations), and the ROC lost the civil war. Vancouver was never part of the Chinese state. Taiwan was. Equating diaspora communities under capitalism with a disputed postwar territory is either ignorance or bad faith.

“‘The war never ended’ your war was against the KMT, who are all over 80 now. What’s the point?”

Wars are not annulled by age. The Chinese Civil War ended militarily on the mainland but was frozen internationally, not resolved. The ROC continued to claim sovereignty over all of China for decades, occupied China’s UN seat until 1971, and functioned as a forward base of US military power. The “point” is not personal vengeance against old men; it is the unresolved question of sovereignty created by imperialist containment.

“‘Taiwan has always been part of China’ no it hasn’t.”

This is half-true and therefore misleading. Taiwan was not always tightly administered, just as many frontier regions in premodern states were loosely governed. That does not mean it was “outside China” in the modern sense. Qing sovereignty was real, if uneven. More importantly, modern sovereignty does not rest on how much an island was romanticized by imperial officials centuries ago. In the modern age it rests on post World War II settlements and state succession. After 1945, Taiwan was returned to China. The dispute since then is not ancient history; it is Cold War geopolitics.

“Taiwanese are closer to the evil Japanese than us so they are bad.”

This is a strawman. The serious critique is not cultural affinity but colonial legacy. Japanese rule materially reshaped Taiwan in ways that the KMT later exploited, while suppressing indigenous and working-class agency. Pointing that out is not moralizing about “bad people”; it is analyzing how colonial layers produced today’s contradictions.

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.

I wrote a full reply but realized none of it really matters until we get clarity on terms. What do you actually mean by liberal values, and which of those do you think are foundational to Marxism?

When I say liberal values, I mean things like: the primacy of private property; formal equality before the law regardless of material conditions; individual rights abstracted from real social relations; freedom of contract between unequal classes; the liberal state as a supposedly neutral arbiter standing above society; and “freedoms” of speech, press, and association that in practice follow ownership and class power—up to and including a legal system that treats rich and poor “equally” such as criminalizing both for sleeping under bridges. These are not accidental features of liberalism or it’s values but flow directly from its idealist foundations.

Liberalism begins from abstract ideas (rights, the individual, the citizen) and treats them as primary, as if they exist independently of history and material conditions. Marxism begins from the opposite direction: dialectical and historical materialism, which treats those liberal categories as historically specific social products tied to a particular mode of production. That is a fundamental theoretical clash.

Because of this, Marxism does not aim to complete or realize liberal values, but to explain why they arise under capitalism and why they cannot deliver real human emancipation. So before talking about “sublation” or continuity, we need to be clear whether liberalism is being treated as an ideal to be fulfilled, or as an ideological form to be scientifically analyzed and superseded.

That’s just because you lack understanding. Liberals are “treated as a monolith” because each individual on their own is irrelevant compared to the systems and superstructures they uphold. You’re stuck in the individualist view which is largely unhelpful for serious or proper political analysis which the jokes and memes then flow from.

Trotskyism tends to manifest as a white saviour complex with Marxist language so it’s not particularly surprising they view aes as less than.

Liberalism and “liberal values” are not the basis of Marx’s work at all, they are one of his main targets of critique. Marx doesn’t start from liberal individual rights and then argue they’re imperfectly realized. He argues those rights are themselves products of bourgeois society and function to mask class domination. Saying Marx supports “individual liberty” doesn’t make him a supporter of “liberal values”, because liberal liberty is abstract and formal, while Marx’s freedom is material and social. This second response just restates Marx’s view of the individual as socially produced, which is correct, but it is reinforcing Marx rejection of liberalism. Marx was never refining liberal values, he was explaining why they arise under capitalism and why they cannot deliver real human freedom.

Left voice

I sure wish they did.