this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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Communism
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That whole thread:
"These gentlemen think that when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves. This is how these profound thinkers mock at the whole world"
My favorite Engels tweet.
hmm, I wonder who controls the socialist state
No one should control the state because there shouldn’t be a state. If there is a state then there’s oppression.
As an ML I actually agree with you, the state is a weapon and i would like to see it one day outlive it's usefulness and wither so that communism can be achieved. However, it's a weapon that you absolutely cannot discard until capitalism has been destroyed, and until then, unilateral disarmament is guaranteed suicide for a revolutionary movement.
As is blind faith in a revolutionary movement's ability to wield such a weapon in the interest of the proletariat and towards communism. Seems like a lot of people in this thread are forgetting Mao's critique of the USSR.
"The revisionist Khrushchov clique abolish the dictatorship of the proletariat behind the camouflage of the "state of the whole people", change the proletarian character of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union behind the camouflage of the "party of the entire people" and pave the way for the restoration of capitalism behind that of "full-scale communist construction". - Mao - marxists.org
But is this not equally true for China today?
It is not.
Just because a state brands itself socialist doesn't say anything about the level of democracy or workers' control of it.
sure, but if we were talking about non-socialist states that call themselves socialist, we wouldn't call them socialist states
Well IMHO both USSR and China shows how gaining workers control and keeping it, or moreso making significant headway towards communism, is just much more complicated. Representative worker ownership of the means of production through the state doesn't have a compelling track record. I think it's dishonest, reactionary and anti intellectual to laugh off arguments like that of comrade spood from the screenshot above.
Edit: checked out my claim on calorie intake and discovered it was dubious. Removed, but letting the main argument stay.
The USSR was eventually compromised, so it technically failed in that sense, but how is China an example of failing to retain worker control? If you're claiming that capitalists control China's government, I'd challenge you to provide some evidence
Lack of press freedom, organization freedom, social credit system, great firewall of China, over 2000 work hours pr year (France has 1500), severely low scores in democracy rankings. This doesn't smell much like worker control, more like authoritarianism. But then again, I'm very much from the West. Happy to be educated on my shortcomings in understanding 👍
Compared to what country? What exactly are workers not allowed to say or write in China that is allowed in the West?
Compared to what country? There are hundreds of protests every day across China
You mean the "system" that's been debunked many times by various Western capitalist media outlets?
Maintaining Internet sovereignty from the imperial core and having workers in control of the government are not mutually exclusive
Citation needed
Whose rankings, and why do you consider them relevant?
The burden of proof is on you, since you are making extraordinary claims. No matter, here:
https://rsf.org/en/ranking china nr 173
https://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=1000:50002:0::NO:50002:P50002_COMPLAINT_TEXT_ID:4341007 one of many cases. Are you allowed to start a union in China? Doesn't seem like it.
https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/2010-11/FreedomOfInformationChina/great-firewall-technical-perspective/index.html Re firewall - information blockade and surveillance != Worker control nor sovereign internet.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9049298 One of thousands scholarly articles on this. Next youre gonna tell me IEEE is revisionist?
https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours 2200 working hours pr year is ridiculous!
You're not really convincing me that China is a good example of worker control. Let me ask you something:
Your imperialist mouthpiece sources only confirm one thing: Imperialists HATE china. This confirms that china is on the correct track.
The firewall? Imperialists hate it.
Workers in charge? Imperialists hate it.
Real democracy? Imperialists hate it.
State-owned enterprises? The usa MIC hates it.
The "international organizations"? Owned by usa or its lackeys.
Citation needed.
Talking to liberals like this is just a massive waste of time and energy. "Why is China ranked low on democracy indices made in the largest carceral state in the world?" Same old talking points regarding social credit. All these "thousands" of articles cite one Chinese source and the rest is a circlejerk of western authors. No news of any person being targeted or denied credit because of this. No real world ramifications documented. Just yellow peril fearmongering about how the sinister Chinese are watching your every move. Please don't come back here.
Which extraordinary claims have I made, exactly? That China isn't a horrible dystopia? The burden of proof isn't on me here, but I'll bite:
RSF, the organization that receives significant funding from the NED (an offshoot of the CIA) and various other imperialist organizations? Frankly, even if we ignore that part, why should anyone care about some tier list that doesn't even include justifications?
Exactly which part of this page claims that creating a union is illegal in China?
That certainly is an opinion a person can have. My view is that there is no intrinsic connection between the two.
From the article: "Data and algorithms for China's social credit system (SCS) are a topic of great current interest. Nonetheless, few details regarding China’s SCS have been officially released. What is clear, however, is that China's social credit system uses broader criteria than Western systems to rank and rate entities. The system is expected to operate through a wider range of mechanisms at the public and private spheres in order to assess the trustworthiness of individuals, businesses, and professional sectors with a goal to reward good behaviors and punish bad behaviors. A full implementation SCS is expected to have wide-ranging impacts on the lives of individuals and organizations than Western-style credit systems. The SCS can be considered an instrument of an overarching ideology that simply reflects the interests of the CCP leaders."
In other words, a bunch of assumptions. Truly an incredible scholarly article.
Being a large journal doesn't mean the research is credible, particularly not for an organization based in the imperial core.
From the page: "Annual hours are based on estimates of weekly working hours and weeks worked."
More guesswork, then. Do you have an actual primary source for this claim, or just opaque analyses from petit bourgeois Westerners?
Comments on post-edit questions:
Feel free to look at this, it's a very useful source if you're actually interested in learning
Both of these things have yet to be proven. There's no complete freedom of speech, including press freedom, in any country that has ever existed. I'd challenge you to find me the equivalent of Julian Assange who's being tortured in China right now.
If you mean the Communist Party of China, they're elected by the proletariat using a bottom-up structure (everyone votes in local elections, the elected representatives vote in higher-level elections, etc.). See the link I mentioned above.
These "international organizations" aren't very international considering they're based in Western countries and controlled by Western capitalists. I give zero credibility to claims made without any evidence, especially if they're working for a fascist or imperialist cause.
I have yet to see any evidence that the social credit system exists, so there's no point in commenting on that.
The firewall is very good and should be implemented by any country that takes its sovereignty seriously, considering the role of various Amerikan social media companies in coups and colour revolutions around the world; those who can read other languages and want to access foreign servers are fully capable of doing so with a VPN. I have yet to see an example of it having a negative impact on workers' ability to influence the government for any domestic issues.
I hope you're actually asking in good faith; if so, you'll have a look at the GitHub page I linked. If you're going to avoid it and post more citation-free articles from bourgeois media outlets, I don't personally have the patience to keep replying
Michael Parenti quote.
It's as much analysis as you can expect from the userbase of Tumblr lite.
Tumblr lite, or tumblr alt right?
Let's be fair to them, at least they aren't reactionary. Still, unfunny "uwu" memes mixed with Lockheed Left behaviour does not paint a much more enjoyable scene.
Lockheed Left is reactionary though.