Also no apology yet for continuing to materially support the ongoing genocide in Palestine by white fascist colonizers. Or for the 27 million Russians killed in WW2, the largest group of victims by far. Or for murdering over a million socialists. Or for financing and arming the anti-communist genocide in Indonesia in 1965/66. If Germany is anything, it’s consistent. Not one bit less eager to commit genocide today.

Maybe you could think about it like that: capitalists are the class that, in order to exist, is forced to continuously take capital and invest it to make profit or they are outcompeted by other capitalists. It’s not that they are all evil or “corrupted by power”, they are not just incentiveized, but forced to act in destructive ways: steal surplus value from workers, increase exploitation above what people can take, chase profits on an exponentially expanding mass of capital in a finite world destroying the planet, cause a crisis about every seven years, cannibalize their own state and infrastructure that they rely on for short term profit, etc.

They inevitably run into these contradictions due to living on a finite planet and having to put individual interests above all else while the modern economies distribution of work and global value chains absolutely require working together.

What you are worried about is real too in a way, but it’s not a class. In a socialist state, a managerial part of the working class is not forced by competition to continuously pursue personal gain, but some of them still might become corrupt and do so anyway. At that point, they have betrayed the working class and they might even do so in favor of real capitalists domestic or abroad who haven’t yet completely disappeared as a class. It’s a possible problem, but other than the class conflict between workers and capital, it’s not inevitably the dominating principle of society.

Rather than worrying about a hypothetical future betrayal of fellow workers in thriving and prospering China, we should focus on how many western workers have already often betrayed the rest of the global working class and continue to do so by supporting terrible imperialist wars, mostly in turn for cheap goods at Walmart.

Okay, so you think the capitalist owned media would like anarcho-communism if they only knew the difference? Or that they’d like general communism better than “stalinism” (a fictional anti-communist propaganda term, not something that has ever existed in the real world).

Well, go on then, just try telling everyone about how great (anarcho)-communism is. But get in touch with some comrades first and let them know, so they can come to literally bail you out when state repression inevitably hits you hard.

As a class, abstracted from individuals, yes, the class rule of a minority has to be manipulative or the majority wouldn’t tolerate it. Hegemony means generalization of particular minority interests. They make it our business, that their profits keep flowing. In a profitability crisis, they make everyone else suffer for it.

Not really, there a tendency, but framing it like that sounds idealist. It’s not about who or how people are in themselves that makes them popular and powerful. It’s how useful they are to the ruling class. Being a manipulative sociopath certainly helps in not caring about other human beings, but if they help to justify the oppressive system in power, it doesn’t matter whether they are intelligent or not. They can also honestly believe to do the right thing, while doing terrible things, if they don’t understand the economic system they find themselves in and it’s contradictions.

Take Robert Owen, during his time, he was the most popular person in the British empire. He wasn’t manipulative, evil or sociopathic. He was just wrong. As an utopian socialist, he lacked the proper understanding about how capitalism functioned. By chance he became a very rich capitalist, exploiting many people. Out of goodwill, he became the first philanthropist. His workers lived way better lives than usual, but they were still exploited. His message that capitalism could be profitable and humane made him extremely popular, because it served the ruling classes.

Then he came to understand his error. His workers, even though they worked “only” ten hours a day instead of the usual twelve, were still completely depended on him. In his words, they were still his “slaves”. He detested that and took action. He tried to convince everyone, that the whole system had to change radically. He was immediately shunned and hated by the establishment. Excluded from business he still tried to do everything he could think of to help the poor. He died poor himself.

But being useful to hegemonic oppressors is not the only way. There’s another way for us to gain power, but collective power instead of individual one: through solidarity, class struggle and revolution.

You’re right to harshly critique all western countries, but

No country is worth saving at this point

That’s just nihilist defeatism. Nihilists are nothing but losers who like being losers. They hate everything but refuse to do anything about it. They believe their lives to be meaningless, so proceed to live meaningless lives.

Instead, why not use your sharp critical thinking skills to do something helpful: build class consciousness in people and prepare the revolution. Read marxist leninists theory and teach others! It’s very easy to get started

Cowbee is incredibly patient and doing marvelous educational work in threads like this. You confuse it for a debate, but you’d need to be on even footing for that. It’s more like they are a teacher who calmly tries to make some common sense stick with western people who behave like spoiled children and are to privileged and racist to see the simple and plain truths that literally most people in the (non-western) world see clearly.