That’s great to hear!

Out of curiosity, communists would like to see a classless stateless society too, but how do you propose we get there?

And by the way China is not a one party state. Yes it is a dictatorship of the proletariat which means that the communist party, as by far the biggest political force with almost a hundred million members, will always be the primary driver of the state, but there are other political parties independent of the CPC which are also represented in the National People's Congress. These are kind of like special interest groups and although they are a minority they play a fairly active role in the political discussions that take place. They get to represent their interest groups and give input, and participate at least to some extent in shaping policies.

Is the existence of multiple parties necessary for a system to be democratic? No, not at all. The PRC would be no less democratic even if no other parties but the CPC were allowed. Then all of the democracy would just happen in one single party, making it effectively a no-party system, kind of like Cuba. But it is an interesting factoid that most westerners are not familiar with.

Democracy is not simply voting for one party or the other, it is a process of self-determination that can exist in many different frameworks, not just in the framework of liberal multi-party parliamentary systems. More than any other civilization in the world, it is the so-called West that has never really understood the concept of democracy as it has always been too obsessed with procedure and formal structures rather than with the application and representation of the will of the people, their real interests and their material needs. Most other civilizations already had much more advanced democratic traditions in one way or another before European colonialism came.

A lot of the opposition that baby leftists like ancoms have to ML concepts and ML states stems from a lack of education and knowledge. This is not their fault, obviously a bourgeois education system purposely hides information about the historical and present realities of socialist states, distorts their ideologies and purposely misinforms. The reason why they do this should be fairly obvious when considering the class interest that a bourgeois state represents.

However that also means that in order to break through this barrier of ignorance and miseducation people need to put in the work and actively seek out the information that has been withheld from them, which can be quite tough as there are sometimes significant language barriers simply due to the fact that there was historically very little translation of Russian and Chinese literature on these subjects.

If you want for instance to educate yourself on how the Soviet system actually worked, like the nuts and bolts of it in detail and not just in sweeping generalizations written by people with an ideological agenda to discredit it, you need to go digging in fairly obscure literature. The same goes for the Chinese system where there is plenty of literature of course in the Chinese language but much of it is just not accessible outside of China, in part due to the purposeful suppression of this information by the western information space.

But when you actually begin to learn how the political system of the PRC works in detail, right down to the lowest local levels you see that there is actually an incredible amount of not just political and ideological struggle but active grassroots democratic participation. And this is replicated all the way from the bottom to the top of the system with the government constantly working on a loop of input from the people, crafting policies, putting them into practice, them listening to the feedback and criticism and repeating the loop all over again perfecting their policies bit by bit each time.

Of course sometimes they will get things wrong, and some experiments will not work out, this is to be expected. But what really sets a proletarian democracy apart from a liberal bourgeois system is that the state actively makes an effort to correct course, respond to the public's needs and work in the best interest of the people. In the US the opposite is the case and we have seen this proven by academic studies which show that the policies implemented by the government have virtually zero correlation to what the people want.

And the result of this are reflected in the approval ratings of the respective governments, with China having one of if not the highest approval ratings in the world and the US one of the lowest.