You don't have the answers because you don't actually care about "empowering the proletariat" beyond using the proletariat as a rhetorical device to beat up a strawman. Plenty of time to post how China's doing it wrong, no time to do something constructive

Ok I didn't ask how not to do it. How would one go about this in concrete terms, guided by the plethora of attempts in the past? How do you avoid it getting crushed by the united bourgeoisie of other countries?

How would you empower the proletariat?

Yup, no one said it

Can you explain one thing about how the Chinese or Cuban elections work without looking it up?

Capitalism "going off the rails" completely understates it. The history of the last 500 years is soaked in the blood of the capitalism. Voter apathy has nothing to do with it. Enthusiastic voters gave us genocide of indigenous peoples of North America, the nuclear bombing of Japan, and currently a 75 year genocide of Palestinians. Not to mention things that voters do not have even the semblance of a choice, such as CIA activities in the 20th century which led to bloody coups in Indonesia, Chile, and Iran, just to name 3.

You need to incorporate class analysis or else nothing makes sense. Why do American voters get shitty choices that reduce their power to the advantage of the wealthy oligarch class? Why are there oligarchs if capitalism doesn't tend to monopoly? Does voting actually do anything? Why does the electoral college still exist? Why did Americans support the Iraq War? What role did the media serve?

I think it’s naive that communism somehow automatically makes those problems go away/means we’ll never end up with similar problems. Especially when communist countries are consistently doing worse/falling into authoritarian rule.

Communism doesn't automatically make anything go away. The point is that the ruling class of capitalists are an obstacle to making things go away. I'm not sure what is your criteria for authoritarian rule. Capitalist countries are authoritarian too, it's basically a meaningless signifier coming out of cold war propaganda that said communism = dictatorship and capitalism = muh freedom. The democratic processes in China and Cuba of example are lightyears ahead of what you can find in the US or European parliamentary so-called democracies.

Ok champ

Will you remove your downvote now that Kupyansk is almost taken by the Russians?