Classless society when?
When the foundations for classes are erased, through full public ownership in a global Socialist economy. Industry has to advance to that level.
And that can only happen when capitalism stops being the dominant global ideology.
Of course! Hence why Imperialism is the primary contradiction, and why the US Empire’s latest trend of nakedly tearing out its own foundations in favor of short-term profits is likely going to be a major topic in future history books.
exactly right
Not gonna lie, china felt like the enemy a few months ago. Now they feel like the sane alternative to being allies with the us. Not saying they are the good guy, but certainly better than the us is.
China = USSR USA = N@Z Germany
Starting to look this way
Fascists
Vs
Communists
again
Wish we had the communists.
I dont think China counts as Communist, kinda like how the USSR was state socialist. Although personally I would call China mixed economy state socialism.
I don’t think China really counts as Fascist.
FYI
One could check with any state how many properties of fascism they align with
I think the key difference is that Xi has a very strong vision for China and is actually practicing what he preaches; enriching the nation rather than enriching himself. Like a strict father, head of the family.
While the debacle that is the US government is all about enriching themselves and their associates rather than the nation. Like goblins in a mine.
Like a strict father
Is politics just the spectrum of daddy issues an individual might have?
That’s less a consequence of specific individuals in power and more the systems at play that lead to differences between those in power. “Great Man Theory” largely takes away from actual Materialist analysis.
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Trump is a Russian agent
BlueMAGA liberals try not to blame all of America’s problems on foreigners challenge (impossible)
Very Confucian
It’s really about what’s more important to you and where you set your priorities. Or maybe it’s actually about being short-sighted or far-sighted.
The US seems to believe that having “rich” people and a poor-rich divide will somehow foster or speed up technological development. I would say that is an almost religious belief. I don’t really agree with it too much personally, and also i don’t like how they approach their population as “wave slaves” who are threatened with starvation and homelessness if they don’t work; but also i’m not gonna interfere with US internal affairs.
I really do think that all the “corporation” things are short-sighted, and it is wise to take the “long-run” perspective and ask what will be in a 1000 years, in a billion years.
I do think that being a bully like the US is is short-sighted, an in fact disadvantageous in the long run, because it makes people distrust them, and that’s a thing that puts you in a disadvantageous position in general.
I mean, it’s a really competitively efficient system. We outpaced the rest of the world on a lot of things for a while there. We even have the 1% self-exploiting with highly specialized skills, 3X as likely to work more than 50hrs a week. All gas, no brakes.
The competition = efficient / spurs invention is mostly a myth.
The peak period of US inventions, was from ~ 1930-1980, when it was forced (by the USSR’s rapid growth) to adopt a similar public-planning model, and allocate a ton of resources to public projects. This article gets into it.
There’s also the book, The people’s republic of wal-mart, which isn’t the best, but it does contain one good argument: companies like Wal-mart and Amazon are many times the size of the GDP of even many countries, and they don’t compete internally, and use full-scale planning, with information provided at every level. It shows a few cases where companies tried to emulate the “compete = win” by splitting their company into many competing divisions, and of course the companies quickly imploded because of the massive waste of resources.
Another good book on this is CJ Chivers - The Gun. It compares the history around the development of the AK-47 (which was collectively designed and had input from many state-level entities), vs the M16’s development, and how these two different development models affected their success.
I’m really interested in those books, thanks for citing them.
But peak period? You’re missing the whole information age. In AI alone, we lead the world.
And competition from the USSR is competition, too. You’re right that top-down planning is ideal for a lot of things, so the definition of ‘competitively’ I most intended was more like ‘stronger than other countries.’In AI alone, we lead the world.
*Deep Seek has entered the chat.*
“can i run the government?”
yes, just place your head through this hole and we’ll pull the big lever that makes you god-king
Just the fact that financial crimes over a certain amount are punishable by death in China (and people have actually been executed for them) says a lot. It’s a law that literally applies only to the rich because a normal person would never even get to glimpse the amount of money required for execution to be on the table.
George Carlin skit about executing corrupt bankers on live TV
He was right, too. A few bankers and politicians get the wall and, what do you know, suddenly being very rich is good enough for a bunch of these corrupt fucks.
The fact that rich people are routinely executed in China is one of the clearest indications that dictatorship of the proletariat has been achieved. And this is precisely why China terrifies the west so much.
China has a really high population so the total count numbers are going to seem high.
The second column tells you that it’s a whopping 0.6% of China’s population while every other country is between 2.7% and 8.5%. Guess which country is the 8.5%
yes i know, i was well aware of that when posting it.
That Australian number seems inflated by property. People bought houses 40 years ago for a handshake and a nod and now the houses are “worth” 2 million dollars or whatever. But if you sell your house you need to buy another one and they come in 2 sizes: million dollar family home or million dollar shoebox studio in the city.
So it’s monopoly money.
dictatorship of the proletariat has been achieved.
I think it’s a strong indicator that the political class hasn’t been completely bought (yet) but it doesn’t at all look like a dictatorship of the proletariat even a little bit.
Do tell how Chinese system doesn’t look like a dictatorship of the proletariat even a little bit this ought to be good.
Nobody deserves the death penalty. It’s just cruelty with no benefit for the society. Studies show, time after time, that it has little to no deterrent effect. Its only purposes are either narrow-minded vengeance or preventing a person from being freed once the current government fails.
That said, I’m all for confiscating all wealth from anyone worth over a billion dollars and placing them under arrest until they can effectively demonstrate they are no longer a parasite on the society.
Counterpoint: if you deem killing hundreds to thousands of others by spreadsheet to make your line go up, you have to be made an example of. I don’t care if Eichmann could have been rehabilitated or if Netanyahu can, they’re not worth the manpower required to get them there.
Crimes of necessity are one thing, death or cruel punishment won’t do a single bit. Crimes of greed? Those fucks only understand deterrence by threat of violence, because all they think of is themselves.
If the Sackler family had been executed for their crimes I bet you’d see far fewer claims denied and insulin wouldn’t be worth an arm and a leg.
Counterpoint: if you deem killing hundreds to thousands of others by spreadsheet to make your line go up, you have to be made an example of.
Sure. Confiscate everything they have, confiscate everything their family has, put them in prison. There is little difference in deterrence between that and the death penalty.
I don’t care if Eichmann could have been rehabilitated or if Netanyahu can, they’re not worth the manpower required to get them there.
Whether you care or not is irrelevant when we’re talking about a human life.
Crimes of necessity are one thing, death or cruel punishment won’t do a single bit. Crimes of greed? Those fucks only understand deterrence by threat of violence, because all they think of is themselves.
Sure. Imprisonment is definitionally violence.
If the Sackler family had been executed for their crimes I bet you’d see far fewer claims denied and insulin wouldn’t be worth an arm and a leg.
Or, uh, if this shit was properly regulated in the first place there wouldn’t be as many parasites getting wealthy on it, and there would be no price gouging. Look at the rest of the “developed” world, insulin is basically free there, and 0 executions were needed to get there (unless we’re counting the threat of proletariat revolution, but then the US also had that). Those who would still abuse the system could be imprisoned to stop them from doing so.
What usually happens in China is that, if the accused cooperates, their death sentence is commuted to life imprisonment. Otherwise they are indeed executed.
That’s a bit better, I guess? But then China still executes the most people in the world every year, most of them not even billionaires. How many of them are innocent working-class people framed for something they didn’t do? (Hint: historically that percentage is alarmingly high if you look at other countries). Fuck that shit, countries should abolish executions after their socialist revolution succeeds.
tbh you can’t exile people anymore and getting staggering rich requires sustained campaigns of oppressive violence and exploitation.
It’s self defence, you’re talking about people that have demonstrated a complete lack of empathy and a complete lack of wanting to use their resources to rectify that or limit the harms they can do.
These aren’t like people with FAS trying to do anger management courses because their brains got damaged. They’re unrepentant, remorseless, and cruel. They had the resources to do literally anything to demonstrate contrition and chose not to every single day.
It’s self defence, you’re talking about people that have demonstrated a complete lack of empathy and a complete lack of wanting to use their resources to rectify that or limit the harms they can do.
It’s definitionally not self-defense to kill someone who’s already in handcuffs. I don’t care if they are straight up evil, no living being deserves to be murdered once they present no actual danger.
If you have a way to rehabilitate them don’t hold back.
That’s kinda irrelevant to murdering someone. But yeah, if you make your prisons places that fix people rather than places for punishment (provide prisoners the ability to learn actually useful skills and put them to use, and offer therapy) I think that even some of the worst parasites, murderers, etc can eventually become useful members of society (see the Scandinavian prison model for how this can be applied quite successfully).
Scandanavia doesn’t rehab billionaires lmao.
Yeah sure, Scandinavian countries are capitalist and thus billionaires are treated as demigods. We still observe that their prison system has better outcomes for everyone involved (convicts & society) compared to US/Chinese system of “prisons as punishment only” and learn from it.
the dictatorship of capital vs the dictatorship of the proletariat
I’m not living in USA but I think people got exactly what they voted for, didn’t they?
Now the question of it being an educated vote and people being equipped to navigate modern media with modern disinformation techniques is another subject.
Not really. The people get only two choices of candidates who are selected by campaign popularity. Those candidates have to raise the money for it by themselves, which means making truthful private campaign promises to their donors while making false promises to the public.
That’s fair. In France law requires transparency on how you fund your campaign and sets a limit. We often have candidates who bend the rules but justice at least make it harder.
Ofc it’s hard to compare our two countries, the US is a fking continent.
If france is anything like the UK, I’m sure there are many ways for the capitalist class to exert influence over their choice of candidate.
In France our main concern is about “Bolorisation”, which is about two billionaires owning most of the mainstream medias (including Vincent Bolloré, hence the name). We still have major independant papers but they hardly choose what’s on the public debate.
Yeah that’s what I meant by my initial message, there people still have access to somewhat reliable source of information, mostly thanks to publicly owned TV and radio, but it’s very very very fragile right now. Education to media and information would be critical to navigate this mess, but we suck at this.
brilliant insight. merci beaucoup mon ami!
I mean, if you count the (registered) non-voters, which I think is more than fair considering the fact that Harris and Trump only represent a fraction of the (electorally viable) politics expressed in the US, Trump only scrapes about 46%.
The American political system has been designed to disenfranchise as many people as possible. Some ways are overt, like disenfranchising and deregistering black, ethnic, and imprisoned citizens (the latter don’t even count towards that 54%!). How about the ways democrats and republicans explicitly outlawed “third” parties such as PSL, Greens, Libertarians on some state ballots?
Less overt ways are how most of the American electoral process is carried out during the working week, with zero affordance to workers to vote unless by post (inherently less secure) or by the altruism of their bosses. Disabled and elderly people are simply ignored if they wish to vote in person.
Then the final way Americans are disenfranchised is the simple act of alienation of the political class from the working class. No matter who won in November, most of these crises would be playing out in some form.
Elon may accelerate some of the rot, but oligarchs have had direct control of the American political system for its whole existence. American bombs would still be raining across the middle east, the Ukrainian war would be unjustly spilling blood in the name of empire, abortion would still be illegal across most of the US, and the govt would do nothing to challenge spirally costs of living for workers.
I mean, the electorate is definitely unqualified to pick their own leaders, but that’s what decades of gutting education funding with absolutely no public pushback gets you. An unqualified electorate elects unqualified representatives.
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gets reeducated, reappears as a productive member of society
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Power and wealth control governments … every government.
Once humanity figures out how to provide more equitable power and wealth to every person everywhere, then we might be able to evolve beyond jungle rules.
In the meantime, it doesn’t matter what you want to call it … communism, socialism, capitalism, liberalism, whatever … as long as we allow unlimited wealth and power to flow to small groups of people, any system will always end up with the same results.
Inequality absolutely needs to be eliminated to have a truly equitable society. That said though, it’s pretty clear that China does have a dictatorship of the proletariat in place. If it didn’t then same things we see happening in capitalist societies would be happening there as well.
I don’t support the CCP, but I do think about these things. How do you create an open system like a democracy that leverages some of the benefits of capitalism, while also insuring economic inequality is minimized and every citizens basic needs are met, without gradually seeing the rich gain influence in that system over time, corroding the protections that make it work? I think as long as the system is open, the rich will use their power to gradually gain advantage and then destroy the system itself. I think the only real shot at it would be for wealth to be seriously capped. Like, no one person can have more than 100% more wealth than the bottom 1%. Anything above that should be taxed away. Also, corporations are not people and corporations should not have shareholders that are not workers.
The PRC largely keeps their bourgeoisie in line by holding almost all of Heavy Industry and large firms in the Public Sector. The owner of a rubber ball factory has far less influence over the economy than the Rubber Factory. In the PRC, banking, energy, steel, infrastructure, and many more critical industries the Private Sector must rely on are held in Public hands. That’s the basis of SWCC.
Time will tell if this was the “correct” choice, but so far the gamble appears to be paying off. There’s a long way to go, but the path forward is open and not closed.
Honestly I’m not the biggest fan of everything in China but these are the types of problems the Chinese government seems to try to figure out a lot more than our governments do.
Strengths and weaknesses. Each country has some. Often the net makes them worse than other countries, but that doesn’t mean they can’t have better aspects
Meh. Most countries round the world seem to suffer from the same problems to me. Sometimes the jack boot on your neck presses down more. Sometimes less.
I think I would extend it thus:
In America, the rich controls the government - to screw everyone else in the country (and sometimes those outside). In China, the government controls the rich - to screw everyone else in the country (and sometimes those outside).
…and with a bonus few:
In Russia, the top of the government controls the rich who control the rest of the government - to screw anyone they can get away with screwing while waving the “just remember we have nukes” flag. In Europe, the leaders keep flip-flopping about who they should be screwing so they just take turns footgunning while announcing “I meant to do that”, and then slapping each other on the wrists for appearances. In the UK, the rich and the government take turns visiting the pawnshop with anything that isn’t screwed down, then acting shocked when swathes of the government end up effectively owned by other governments.
Bonus evidence of Chinese government screwing everyone in the country.
Here’s the report explaining how a typical Chinese adult is now richer than the typical European adult https://www.businessinsider.com/typical-chinese-adult-now-richer-than-europeans-wealth-report-finds-2022-9
90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-people-in-china-afford-their-outrageously-expensive-homes
Chinese household savings hit another record high in 2024 https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-jones-bank-earnings-01-12-2024/card/chinese-household-savings-hit-another-record-high-xqyky00IsIe357rtJb4j
People in China enjoy high levels of social mobility https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/china-social-mobility.html
The typical Chinese adult is now richer than the typical European adult https://www.businessinsider.com/typical-chinese-adult-now-richer-than-europeans-wealth-report-finds-2022-9
Real wage (i.e. the wage adjusted for the prices you pay) has gone up 4x in the past 25 years, more than any other country. This is staggering considering it’s the most populous country on the planet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cw8SvK0E5dI
The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w23119.pdf
From 1978 to 2000, the number of people in China living on under $1/day fell by 300 million, reversing a global trend of rising poverty that had lasted half a century (i.e. if China were excluded, the world’s total poverty population would have risen) https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/China’s-Economic-Growth-and-Poverty-Reduction-Angang-Linlin/c883fc7496aa1b920b05dc2546b880f54b9c77a4
From 2010 to 2019 (the most recent period for which uninterrupted data is available), the income of the poorest 20% in China increased even as a share of total income. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.20?end=2019&%3Blocations=CN&%3Bstart=2008
By the end of 2020, extreme poverty, defined as living on under a threshold of around $2 per day, had been eliminated in China. According to the World Bank, the Chinese government had spent $700 billion on poverty alleviation since 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/world/asia/china-poverty-xi-jinping.html
Over the past 40 years, the number of people in China with incomes below $1.90 per day – the International Poverty Line as defined by the World Bank to track global extreme poverty– has fallen by close to 800 million. With this, China has contributed close to three-quarters of the global reduction in the number of people living in extreme poverty. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-new-report-looks-at-lessons-from-china-s-experience
If we take just one country, China, out of the global poverty equation, then even under the $1.90 poverty standard we find that the extreme poverty headcount is the exact same as it was in 1981.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/07/5-myths-about-global-poverty
The $1.90/day (2011 PPP) line is not an adequate or in any way satisfactory level of consumption; it is explicitly an extreme measure. Some analysts suggest that around $7.40/day is the minimum necessary to achieve good nutrition and normal life expectancy, while others propose we use the US poverty line, which is $15.
https://www.cgdev.org/blog/12-things-we-can-agree-about-global-poverty
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These are some extremely racist tropes you’re parroting.
I respectfully but firmly disagree regarding three words used here: racist, tropes, parroting. I would have been willing to clarify and defend why (and why I can partially do so from lived-experience), while also empathising about how one part of what I wrote might be possible to misinterpret without that clarification. The comment has since been removed though, so it wouldn’t be productive now. I still feel it important to say that a now-invisible comment of mine being called out as something is in my opinion not that thing (so readers don’t just assume it was without hesitation), while respecting your right to claim as such, especially before seeing any followup clarifications.
Have you considered taking a communications course so you don’t sound like a pretentious, obfuscating jackass?
Eschew gratuitous obfuscation. (See what I mean?)
There seems to have been a modding mistake, based on how your comment is displayed in the modlog
Your name is cleared
It’s deeply embarrassing that you’re old enough to have been verbal in the 90’s and still use the term ‘cognitive dissonance’ when you just mean something you disagree with. You write with the trying-to-sound-smart affectation of a teenager.
The only cognitive dissonance here is your own buddy. The reality is that no human society is perfect and people who keep comparing societies that exist in the real world to some Platonic ideal of society are not serious. China has problems like any other country, however it’s crystal clear that life for the vast majority of people in China has been steadily improving since the revolution, and that the government of China works in the interest of the working majority. People such as yourself will continue regurgitating empty rhetoric, while others will continue to improve their conditions.
I think two productive things I can say in reply to your comment are:
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Your post was about governments and rich people, yet your replies are here referring to the people and the societies. In the spirit of your post, and your reply-comment singling out China, I was replying about the Chinese government (both the things they do, and the things they normalise and accept from bad actors in society), just like I was talking about for the US, Russian, UK, and European governments in my previous comment. A lot of that comes from my empathy for Chinese people, culture, and society - quite the opposite of what it seems you interpreted.
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I think a key to remaining in touch with our core, shared humanity is remembering that some methodological means can never be justified by any material ends, and to keep revisiting what our own personal moral code says about where that line is. Importantly, I don’t reserve that opinion for any subset of political/religious/whatever systems or subset of countries, and have particular distrust for fundamentalist (unquestioning) implementations of any and all of them. Hence, to quote the last (and clearly not by any interpretation “rule breaking”) sentence from my comment:
Kindness and humaneness is not measured in GDP and hot-button topic popularity polls
My post was about two different social systems. The government is a product of the way society is structured. Your claim that Chinese government is a bad actor is at odds with reality as the citations I provided above clearly show. Talking about core values, shared humanity, moral codes, and so on, is all nice and good, but it’s ultimately meaningless unless you can show how that translates into something tangible.
Real kindness and humaneness is measured by how society is able to lift people out of poverty, provide them with education, housing, jobs, food, and healthcare. That’s what the government in China achieved for 1.4 billion people. Meanwhile, idealists in the west have been preaching kindness while allowing the dictatorship of capital rule over every aspect of their lives.
Your claim that Chinese government is a bad actor…
Although that uses many of the same words I used in that sentence it is a fundamentally different sentence from what I said.
Secondly, when I make my point (“my moral code does not allow me to accept that certain means, especially those based on cruelty, can be justified by any number of material results measured by any metrics”) you keep rebutting it by pointing me back to those very result-metrics. It means I feel we are just talking past each other in a failed dialogue on that point, meaning the only constructive response is to just “agree to disagree” on baselines regarding it.
Thirdly,
Meanwhile, idealists in the west have been preaching kindness while allowing the dictatorship of capital rule over every aspect of their lives.
On this point I agree with you entirely. Fundamentalist Capitalism (especially the end-stage variants we are seeing in some places, and the inevitable Disaster Capitalism facilitated by certain politicians) is an absolute cancer. Just as much as Fundamentalist Utilitarianism is a cancer. It seems you keep trying to use that as a gotcha, for some ideological banner I am not even waving.
I suspect my comments are frustrating you (?) because, on the one hand you are championing a political system and inherently accepting that its expediencies are acceptable, whereas I am arguing from a moral standpoint which explicitly considers many of those expediencies to be unacceptable, irrespective of the political ends. You have made many strident criticisms of many political systems and governments, many of which i concur with. I just also include the Chinese government in those criticisms along with the others.
You dismissed my moral standpoint with:
…all nice and good, but it’s ultimately meaningless while…
Conversely, I think all governmental implementations which think they can get away with sidestepping those moral baselines in the name of expedience are destined for corruption and collapse, while leaving a trail of cruelty in their wake. Not just one governmental implementation, all of them. That is why I think the presently constructive action is to accept that our respective “lines in the sand of acceptability” on these issues are different, and just agree to disagree on those points.
Secondly, when I make my point (“my moral code does not allow me to accept that certain means, especially those based on cruelty, can be justified by any number of material results measured by any metrics”) you keep rebutting it by pointing me back to those very result-metrics. It means I feel we are just talking past each other in a failed dialogue on that point, meaning the only constructive response is to just “agree to disagree” on baselines regarding it.
Again, there is zero evidence that cruelty is state policy in China. Meanwhile, if you think that society can completely eliminate individual acts of cruelty and other human vices then you’re once again engaging in fantastical thinking.
I suspect my comments are frustrating you (?) because, on the one hand you are championing a political system and inherently accepting that its expediencies are acceptable, whereas I am arguing from a moral standpoint which explicitly considers many of those expediencies to be unacceptable, irrespective of the political ends.
Your comments are frustrating to me because they’re born out of ignorance. You have not spent the time to actually understand how Chinese system works, and your criticism is rooted in idealistic thinking that ignores the realities of the world we live in.
You have made many strident criticisms of many political systems and governments, many of which i concur with. I just also include the Chinese government in those criticisms along with the others.
Nobody is arguing that the system in China is perfect. What’s being argued is that it is a system that actually works in the interest of the majority, and it’s a preferable real world alternative to what the west is doing. It’s a tangible improvement.
Conversely, I think all governmental implementations which think they can get away with sidestepping those moral baselines in the name of expedience are destined for corruption and collapse, while leaving a trail of cruelty in their wake.
Again, if you bothered to learn a bit of history you’d see that the general principles of the Chinese model has proven to be very stable historically. China has enjoyed centuries long stretches of peaceful existence, while the west has been drenched in blood and violence. I urge you to actually spend the time to learn about China instead of regurgitating demagogy.
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Completely vibes-centric analysis. If the Chinese government were screwing the population, how come every western polling org agrees that the government has at the very, very least 86% approval rates, far above any EU nation, let alone the US?
I don’t even understand how Russia, not even mentioned here, ends up taking like 4/5 of your comment.
The number drops a bit when the polls are done in secrecy. Still far higher than any western government, mind.
Firstly my comment was clearly the comment-equivalent of a shitpost to express generalised disdain for the morally bankrupt hypocritical preschool-behaviour of almost all centralised human power-structures on the global stage, so its slightly disturbing that your threshold for considering something as “analysis” sits that low.
I’m not sure why you are trying to defend China by comparing it to EU & US for me. I lampooned them too. I am an equal-opportunity cynic.
I don’t even understand how Russia, not even mentioned here, ends up taking like 4/5 of your comment.
Did you notice I used the word “extend”? …and mentioned several major countries? I think your mistake is in assuming I am either an AI bot or an intellectually equivalent human “bot” with the naive agenda of waving one team’s flag by trashing all the other flags, and hoping to be on the “winning side” of a zero-sum argument. I am old & cynical enough, especially having actually lived and worked in almost all of the mentioned countries, to have very slowly and very bitterly developed justified disillusionment with the suit-and-tie pantomime masquerading as “leadership” pretty much everywhere on the planet, and know there is no “winning side” for humans the way things are on this planet. If Russia gets more airtime in my tirade at the moment then I’d just say they (who am I kidding, “he”) needs to stop making it so damn easy by generating a virtual firehouse of cruelty purely to make line go up.
I refuse to cheerlead for any nation-state until the world becomes a very different place. Until then I only cheerlead for every single person on their path to growing up, stopping obsessively treating the very administration of people’s lives like a football match, getting off the cruel->“fake nice” spectrum, and getting on the “actual kindness” and “mutual respect” bandwagon. But lately I’ll admit I find myself doing that cheerleading rather halfheartedly and dispiritedly.
And both governments are disgusting
What’s disgusting about China’s government?
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Western man please enlighten us about the systemic issues in China 😂
One thing you notice with all these “my own vibes-based-orientalist” analyses, is that they never have any sources.
Hey now that’s not fair, they often cite Zenz.
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I don’t know what “blatant authoritarianism” is, materially. What does that look like? Over 90% of people approve the government, and 83% (compared to 49% in the US) believe they live in a democracy.
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The treatment of the Uyghur people can definitely be discussed critically, but I think we should follow the UN’s consensus on it, which is that it shouldn’t be considered a genocide. I think calling re-education camps “genocide” despite no mass killings or steralizations makes light of ongoing genocide like that in Palestine. Further, we should be critical of claims of genocide that exclusively originate with Adrian Zenz, a Christian Nationalist that believes China is the antichrist and works exclusively as a myth-making anticommunist. He’s also a documented liar, his claims of forced steralization (paid for by the BBC) come from misrepresenting 8% of annual new IUDs going to Uyghur people for 80%, for a people that were exempt from the One Child Policy due to their status as Ethnic Minorities.
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The CPC does practice censorship. I believe this matter should be left to the people of China to decide, however, as their system appears to be percieved as more democratic and beneficial than the US system is for its people.
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I am not sure what you mean by saying the CPC isn’t Communist anymore. What do you believe a “true Communist” CPC would be doing now, that disqualifies them from being Communist? They are running a Socialist Market Economy where heavy industry and large firms are almost entirely state-owned and controlled, as the meme shows it represents the people over Capital.
Overwhelmingly it looks like the CPC represents the people and is working towards bettering the lives of the working class, such as dramatic expansions in poverty elimination and healthcare cost reductions. They have a long way to go, however, so there is a lot to criticize accurately without holding to the US State Department consensus. One would have to be ignorant to overlook the issues in the PRC, but one would also have to be ignorant to take US State Department lines at face-value when we know they lie all the time. Remember Iraq’s WMD?
I am not sure what you mean by saying the CPC isn’t Communist anymore.
The CPC has never been communist.
It’s socialist.
The CPC is Communist as in they are a Communist party operating on Marxist understanding and analysis. The PRC is Socialist, what the CPC calls Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. Communism as the ideology, not the late-stage, stateless, classless, moneyless society bit.
2·10 hours agoIf you “support” communism you are a Communist.
But if you “support” capitalism you aren’t a Capitalist.
Whoever came up with this shit needs to reevaluate some things.
Yea it’s extremely unintuitive, people also use Capitalist for those who support Capitalism in liberal circles so that even further ruins communication. It all ends up relying on contextual clues, which shouldn’t be the basis of communication IMO.
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No problem.
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China isn’t a one-party state, it has 8 other parties than the CPC that function in cooperation, each with different special interests. Moreover, many officials are democratically elected. The structure is democratic, and the people support its system. Moreover, political engagement in the US is lower because it doesn’t actually impact anything.
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No problem!
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The Chinese people do have an impact on policy, quite a dramatic one. I think you need to do more research in how China’s structure works, it’s best desribed as “top-down, from the bottom-up.” As for why people may support “censorship,” the people of China may believe it is in their best interests to restrict the private influence on information that allows the Bourgeoisie to have a dictatorial control over the press, as is the case in Capitalist countries.
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This is going to take a while, so please bear with me.
The idea that Socialism means full ownership in public hands is wrong, and anti-Marxist. To take such a stance means either Capitalism and Feudalism have never existed either, the sort of “one-drop” rule, or that Socialism itself is a unique Mode of Production that needs to be judged based on “purity” while the rest do not, a conception that has roots in idealism rather than Materialism.
Modes of Production should be defined in a manner that is consistent. If we hold this definition for Socialism, then either it means a portion of the economy can be Socialist, ie USPS, or a worker cooperative, or it means an economy is only Socialist if all property has been collectivized.
For the former, this definition fails to take into account the context to which portions of the economy play in the broader scope, and therefore which class holds the power in society. A worker cooperative in the US, ultimately, must deal with Capitalist elements of the economy. Whether it be from the raw materials they use being from non-cooperatives, to the distributors they deal with, to the banks where they gain the seed Capital, they exist as a cog in a broader system dominated by Capitalists in the US. Same with USPS, which exists in a country where heavy industry and resources are privatized, it serves as a way to subsidize transport for Capitalists. The overall power in a system must be judged.
For the latter, this “one drop” rule, if equally applied, means Feudalism and Capitalism have never existed either. There is no reason Socialism should be judged any differently from Capitalism or Feudalism.
What Socialism ultimately is is a system where the Working Class is in control, and public ownership is the principle aspect of society. If a rubber ball factory is privately owned but the rubber factory is public, the public sector holds more power over the economy. In the Nordics, heavy industry is privatized for the most part, and social safety nets are funded through loans and ownership of industry in the Global South, similar to being a landlord in country form. In the PRC, heavy industry and large industry is squarely in the hands of the public, which is why Capitalists are subservient to the State, rather than the other way around.
As for the purpose of Socialism, it is improving the lives of the working class in material and measurable ways. Public ownership is a tool, one especially effective at higher degrees of development. Markets and private ownership are a tool, one that can be utilized more effectively at lower stages in development. Like fire, private ownership presents real danger in giving Capitalists more power, but also like fire this does not mean we cannot harness it and should avoid it entirely, provided the proper precautions are taken.
Moreover, markets are destined to centralize. Markets erase their own foundations. The reason public ownership is a goal for Marxists is because of this centralizing factor, as industry gets more complex public ownership increasingly becomes more efficient and effective. Just because you can publicly own something doesn’t mean the act of ownership improves metrics like life expectancy and literacy, public ownership isn’t some holy experience that gives workers magic powers. Public ownership and Private ownership are tools that play a role in society, and we believe Public Ownership is undeniably the way to go at higher phases in development because it becomes necessary, not because it has mystical properties.
Ultimately, it boils down to mindsets of dogmatism or pragmatism. Concepts like “true Socialism” treat Marx as a religious prophet, while going against Marx’s analysis! This is why studying Historical and Dialectical Materialism is important, as it explains the why of Marxism and Socialism in a manner that can be used for real development of the Working Class and real liberation. When taken consistently, AES states do in fact fit into the categorization of “Socialist,” even your original definition would categorize them as such.
1.Those parties are subservient to the CCP and officially cannot form opposition to it, reducing their role to merely advisory. It is similar to how the US system is described as “two-party” despite there being some other parties that influence next to nothing (and even then, they are allowed to be in opposition to the Dems and Reps)
3.I have hard time believing that, but discussing it is a thing in itself.
4.I see where you’re going with it.
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That isn’t the same thing, it would be closer to having Super-PACS as parties than controlled opposition. The US is an elaborate illusion of choice, the actual levers of change are easier to access in China.
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If you question it, try asking Chinese people what they think, and read Marx’s position on the press.
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If you’d like, I can offer suggestions on readings from Marx and Engels that supports this.
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i disagree :)
Not a fan of the Uyghurs, eh?
Without an educated, informed population and effective, constantly maintained checks and balances on those in power, the end results of either communism or capitalism are going to be exactly the same.
you’re right actually, guess who said this
What is the working-class movement without socialism?—A ship without a compass which will reach the other shore in any case, but would reach it much sooner and with less danger if it had a compass.
All these things happen far more naturally under communism because systemic pressures favor these things.
What do you mean by “these things”?
I mean that communist system demonstrably results in far better education, and stronger checks and balances than capitalism. Communist countries focus on building infrastructure such as schools and housing, and make education free for everyone. Meanwhile, public ownership of the means of production means wealth isn’t concentrated in the hands of the few. This precludes the problem such as oligarchs owning media and then manipulating public opinion in their own interest. Hope that clears things up for you.
It does, thanks. And I agree. I don’t claim to know what the perfect system is, but I believe it would be some form of democratic socialism with some sort of magical built-in safeguard against wars of misinformation of the type we’re seeing now.
I don’t think anybody knows what a perfect system is, and there simply might not be one. Any system will have a set of trade offs in the end. What we can do though is look at what sort of selection pressures different types of systems create, and try to tune the rules in a way where individual interest aligns with the common interest. It’s going to be a process of trying things, seeing how they work, and iterating. Most people can now see the problems that capitalist relations create, and socialism is a way to address these problems. It’s also worth noting that socialism is inherently democratic in nature.
What about the intermediate results?
What about them?
Even if the ends are the same, how it reaches there and how long it takes to reach there are also concerns
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There is no end but the present, which is the summit of time itself
