They don’t sell their labour [power], they sell the product of their labour; as a result, assuming they don’t employ anyone (or use contract labour), they are artisans, a fairly small but distinct class that shares traits with both the proletariat and the petite bourgeoisie.

If you own a business but don’t employ other workers, you’re neither bourgeois nor proletarian (unless you’re an independent contractor selling your labour power), but you are very likely to have petit bourgeois aspirations. Artisans are always under pressure by the bourgeoisie and will either end up joining them or, in most cases, being “demoted” to a wage worker

I’m working on an introductory port for Russia here, specifically regarding Ukraine. It’s far from finished but you can find plenty of useful sources in the comments.

As for China, I’d just ask them what “expansion” it’s been doing for the past few decades. If they’re referring to China’s projects in Africa, helping countries move beyond resource extraction and basic refinement to higher levels of commodity production does not in any way align with the goals of imperialism.

Or am I misunderstanding what is meant by state?

Yes – a state is not the same thing as a government. In Marxist terms, the state is the organ used by one class to repress another, and by that definition, when there are no classes, there will no longer be a state. Some form of government will exist even in a communist society.

I don’t think there’s much the CIA could do to you if you’re in a socialist country

It’s understandable to cling to some mainstream Western media sources in the beginning. It took a few months for me to realize that they all have a history of warmongering and telling blatant lies in the service of imperialism, and when you actually try to fact check them you’ll find that they either just reference themselves or reference other bourgeois outlets (and so on). That’s not to say that they’re always wrong (there’s usually an element of truth if you read between the lines and exclude the writer’s commentary) or that all journalists working there are deliberately lying, but when there are no solid sources all you can use to judge an article’s truthfulness is the outlet’s and writer’s track records (contrast this with a journalist like Seymour Hersh – his article on the Nord Stream bombing uses anonymous sources, but he has a history of telling the truth about US imperialism, so while it’s not proof, he’s a significantly more reliable source than more or less anyone working for bourgeois media). Bourgeois media articles can be useful to expose inconsistencies in other bourgeois media (sometimes from the same outlet), and some journalists focus mainly on doing this; I would recommend the YouTube channel The New Atlas for this type of content, particularly on Xinjiang as well as historical context for the war in Ukraine, even if he has some political views that don’t align with Marxism-Leninism.

It was also initially shocking to learn that the history taught in schools in the imperial core is largely either manufactured or manipulated to reinforce anticommunism, but if you look at your old history books I’m sure you’ll find a lot of missing citations, a lot of dubious sources, and/or a lot of extremely important omissions

Firstly, the BBC is a UK state-controlled media outlet that routinely spreads imperialist propaganda (and even lies about left-wing movements within the country, as shown by their defamation of Corbyn); it has absolutely no credibility. With that said, the the only citation I could find that wasn’t the BBC itself (and I checked recursively at a depth of 3 before stopping) was this, which is an article by an organization called “Golos” alleging forced voting; I’ve never heard of it before, so I can’t say whether they’re trustworthy. Aside from that citation, it seems to be nothing but anecdotal “evidence”, the credibility of which is proportional to that of the media outlet.

I can’t speak to the video as I’ve never seen it.

Here’s a summary of the coup in Ukraine. As for post-coup Ukraine, you could start by looking at a few of the sources here (I recommend that entire document for learning more about Marxism and imperialism, even if it’s a bit messy). We’ve had several people asking about the conflict, the most recent being this one; you can use the search function on Lemmygrad, just check “Local” and search by posts using a keyword like “Donbas”. Alternatively, you could make another post asking specifically about this (I’m not particularly good at saving my sources, but crowdsourcing would give better results)

Regarding the USSR:

• Where did you read that 14 million people were sent to prisons as slave labour in the USSR?
• Where did you read that millions of people were killed in purges in the USSR?
• Where did you read that the USSR didn’t have collective leadership, and that Stalin had ultimate authority?

Regarding modern Russia:

• Saying “Putin is ruling” is a very liberal standpoint. He is a president, not a monarch.
• Where did you read that Putin’s party is interfering with elections? It’s entirely possible considering it’s a capitalist country and they don’t want to lose to the KPRF, but it’s still important to be skeptical of sources, particularly those with a bad track record.
• Russia has not started any war. In Ukraine, they intervened in and escalated a nearly decade-long civil war ignited by the NATO coup in 2014. The war with Georgia was initiated by Georgia. The war in Syria was started by imperialists, and Russia joined by the Syrian government’s invitation.

Communists are materialists. If capitalist countries make claims about socialist countries without evidence, the default assumption should be that those claims are either entirely untrue or massively inflated. That doesn’t mean they’re always false, but you wouldn’t trust a habitual liar to suddenly tell the truth. There is no way to “prove” if or how a historical event happened, and Amerikan propaganda is extremely effective despite a severe lack of convincing evidence.