democratic centralism, which actually seems to be a quite effective implementation of a democracy.
Read your fucking Lenin. Democratic centralism is an organisational principle for parties, not for societies. Also it doesn’t work as the enforced unity (“thou shalt not question shit that has been voted on”) allows authoritarianism to take root, especially considering that party officials were never freely elected, but from lists drawn up by guess who those already in power.
It’s always funny, Tankies thinking other leftists don’t know anything about the mechanics of ML parties and their state-level experiments. We do. We understand it. We know where it leads. That’s why we don’t want that shit because to communism it leads not. Granted Cuba is on a good path right now but, well, they’ve left a lot of that old ML stuff behind them.
As to China. Fucking China. China doesn’t even have public healthcare. It has billionaires. It’s not even state capitalism it’s straight-up authoritarian capitalism. Singapore but in corrupt, without rule of law, and with polling that you can’t trust because people are both afraid of speaking their mind, as well as isolated from the world.