I'm not sure it will be fruitful to discuss this issue with someone who denies the international ambitions of communism :)
> Note the number of capitalist governments coup'd by communists. Note the number of invasions and constant wars of The West. Look at Vietnam. Western involvement was long-reaching, direct, violent, and generally within other countries fighting grassroots revolutions / civil wars or throwing off colonial it imperial influence.
"the state is always an instrument of class warfare" I'm justifying western imperialism by referring to the nature of the class struggle as characterized by communists. You're not going to convince anyone by denying that communists were interested in spreading their ideology to other countries tries by force and you're not going to convince capitalists by pointing out how successful we were at stopping communist aggression.
> Feudal backwaters
how patrician of you
> Feudal backwaters subject to regular famines became superpowers that eliminated homelessness and hunger. And the fall of those systems corresponded to drops in QoL over and over and over again.
quality of life was pretty bad leading up to the fall, that's why it fell. observing that you can conscript a bunch of farmers to invade outlying countries and steal their grain, then feed those of the survivors you haven't tortured to death in gulags is hardly an argument. I'd be more impressed by the superpower claim if it wasn't the case that the USSR went bankrupt trying to compete as a superpower.
> What other tests would you want?
can you sell your labor or the product thereof for a price of your choosing? Can you buy tools for work and control them as your own property, inclusive of charging rent for their usage? These are QoL issues that are relevant to workers.
> Capital is just stuff or money tradeable for stuff. The stuff didn't go away after color revolutions. But public programs were absolutely privatized or abolished by liberal capitalist governments in moves aligned with their ideologies - ideologies you can find throughout this site, in fact.
Capital is the means of production and it requires maintenance and planning, if capital is not maintained and replaced it wears out and breaks and is no longer capital. The planners in the USSR knew this well and that's why they had so much trouble keeping the system going when they wielded authoritarian powers. They couldn't keep the capital running because they lacked price signals in order to obtain information about scarcity relative to demand. Those public programs had run out of value to reallocate.
> Ah, but in that case there's a consistent ideological position: bourgeois democracy and ownership must be curtailed because otherwise it will grow and eat you and those you love.
Yes, ideology is good for justifying terrible things. Thats why we require that people are allowed to criticize ideology.
> According to liberal democracy, you're supposed to be able to seek and form a representative government in a multi-party setting - yet they restrict those parties to force bourgeois options to be the only ones available.
Yet liberal democracy still falls victim to the paradox of tolerance. Hence the desire to prohibit ideas and ideologies that would overthrow civil society.
> The supposedly core ideals of The West clearly bow to capital when push comes to shove and one should question the propaganda that it's these ideals that won or were even the actual goal.
Actually I question your grasp of the foundational ideas of "The West", whatever that is.
> But the vast majority of several countries want that return, with support increasing with age - the people who actually lived under communist party rule. They are prevented from doing so by their political systems. It cannot be voted in. Democracy clearly doesn't mean that much to The West, right?
I'm not sure your criticism of The West is apt when it is those several countries that fail to heed their respective majorities in returning to authoritarian central planning. Perhaps you are falling victim to the authoritarian's paradox here. Perhaps those democracies are simply engaged in the sort of central planning that is necessary to sustain a society, the kind of central planning that the communist republics they replaced were unable to stomach.