Its like Hillary walking into a working class kitchen for the first time.
They’ve been shielded from even critical support of China and other AES for so long they literally, not figuratively, literally cannot process that people exist that have beliefs that aren’t Reddit Approved. They immediately assume it’s bots or wumao. Human beings can’t possibly hold these beliefs, so they must be Oriental hordes or actual robots.
Right because not being a shill for Xi makes me “pro-west.” Please.
Its not about being a shill for Xi. Its about defending the country that went from having a 20% literacy rate to a country with its own space station in the span of 70 years. With railways and infrastructure that outshines those of the American empire, the richest nation in the history of the be world.
You may not call it socialism but it is still worth defending. My family and friends in China see improvement and growth before their very eyes. Dirt roads are now high speed rail. How many working class Americans can say things have gotten better in the last few decades? That they can afford to dine out more often, that they can afford a bigger apartment? How many can say their children are getting better educated, that schools are improving, that their extra curricular sports programs have gotten funding? How many can say that they’ve seen a new hospital built in a lower income area, or at all? I know households where the grandparents grew up literally illiterate, like animals they weren’t given an education, without running water or electricity, and in leaner months would have to skip meals to pay the landlord. Today their bilingual grand children sit next to them in a home that they own, learning physics from a Livestream from the Chinese Space Station. Can you even conceive that level of improvement to a life, let alone a million, let alone a billion?
And the sheltered Reddit libs cannot understand that people would defend that. They cannot understand why people would defend that. They must be shills, there’s no way anyone could genuinely defend a system that improved the lives of a billion people and abolished poverty. Our memes depict Xi as Winnie the Pooh, so those defending China must be robots or paid shills. No-one would actually defend China right?
All the Chinese people in China who I totally really know in real life for sure. Those Chinese people in China that I totally really know all say they love love Xi. It’s totally because they really really want to and not because dissent isn’t allowed. They totally didn’t start making grade schoolers go to several extra hours of school a day to learn to worship Xi 2 years ago btw. Also there is no air pollution in Beijing. Did I mention I totally know some Chinese people. You’re all a bunch of sheltered white libs…not like me. I mean yeah, I am a lib, only 15, white, and I do live in my parents basement…but I know things, things that you don’t. There’s no way other people have any experience of the world so you have to believe, because I pretend…I mean DO, I do know some Chinese people in China and they are Chinese. They totally love their Chinese life in China where everyone has 120% literacy rate and reads 5 astrophysics books on their way to work in Beijing where there’s no air pollution in China.
…China
“I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
Sorry, which country is brainwashing people to worship their country from childhood? I forget.
It really just blows your mind that there are real people with real opinions based on their life experiences that don’t reflect your biases, doesn’t it.
Dude I am Chinese. I was born in China, my family is from Tianjin and Wuhan. My grandfather grew up illiterate. His comrades were mostly illiterate. One of my grandfather’s comrades I call 爷爷 was the one that went from a peasant family to living in a flat he owns.
你认识多少华人？
Ah yes, because the only way we could possibly admire the achievements of the Chinese state is because we were being paid to do so. Fuck off, creep.
No I think you’re just in an echochamber that didn’t wanna go full doomer because of how capitalist the entire world is. You wanted some hope for socialism so you clung onto China for false hope.
For me it’s like 5% desperately clinging onto China for false hope, 20% not wanting global thermonuclear war, and 75% the global poverty alleviation they’ve been achieving both domestically and worldwide.
oh no, we’re fully aware of how dire things are globally. but that doesn’t mean we have to swallow propaganda whole and go “thank you, may I have another?” it’s a deeply servile attitude.
China is a capitalist country. I don’t disagree with that. However, if you get your head out of your ass and actually read some theory, you will realize that the form of capitalism that is being practiced in China is actually a left-liberal classical capitalism, fundementally grounded in principles of industrial growth discussed by Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Karl Marx, that, if it overtakes the U.S. as global hegemon, actually has the potential to transition into a socialist society.
Their poverty reduction, infrastructure building, and general wheeling and dealing with underdeveloped countries is laudable and far outstrips the history and ability of the West, and while I don’t really like their foreign policy stances, particularly on MLM issues, refusing to actually analyze what is going on there and what has the potential to go on there is a sure sign of the typical, unread, left-com martyrdom complex where you have the audacity to criticize the projects of others without ever having done anything particularly productive or revolutionary yourself.
Right because not being a shill for Xi makes me “pro-west.” Please.
I’m not pro-west I just only believe the literal exact narrative pushed by the US state department and the entirety of bourgeoise-owned media.
Say something worth responding to at least. You choose to put “socialist” in your name yet you’re angry people here might defend a socialist country and not spew the bile fed to you by media that is literally owned or controlled by the bourgeoisie. It’s absurd.
Say what your problem is. Give me something to actually argue with instead of these non-answers.
- Username is CatholicSocialist
- Supports Cuba but not China
- Calls us libs
There’s no way this isn’t a bit.
Catholic
Worship Gnosticism as preached by or be burned alive you fucking heretic.
What makes a country “socialist”?
A society where public ownership of the means of production, a state controlled by a politically organized proletariat, and production for societal use rather than for profit is the principal aspect (main body) of the economy.
Key term here is principal aspect. There is a weird phenomenon from both anti-communists as well as a lot of ultraleft and leftcom communists themselves of applying a “one drop rule” to socialism, where socialism is only socialism if it’s absolutely pure without a single internal contradiction. But no society in the history of humankind has been pure, they all contain internal contradictions and internal contradictions are necessary for one form of society to develop into the next.
If you applied that same logic to capitalism, then if there was any economic planning or public ownership, then capitalism would cease to be “true capitalism” and become “actually socialism”, which is an argument a lot of right-wing libertarians unironically make. The whole “not true capitalism” and “not true socialism” arguments are two sides of the same coin, that is, people weirdly applying an absolute purity standard to a particular economic system which is fundamentally impossible to exist in reality, so they then can declare their preferred system “has never truly been tried”. But it will never be tried ever because it’s an idealized form which cannot exist in concrete reality, actually-existing capitalism and socialism will always have internal contradictions within itself.
If no idealized form exists and all things contain internal contradictions within themselves, then the only way to define them in a consistent way is not to define them in terms of perfectly and purely matching up to that idealized form, but that description merely becoming the principal aspect in a society filled with other forms and internal contradictions within itself.
A capitalist society introducing some economic planning and public ownership doesn’t make it socialist because the principal aspect is still bourgeois rule and production for profit. This would mean the state and institutions carrying out the economic planning would be most influenced by the bourgeoisie and not by the working class, i.e. they would still behave somewhat privately, the “public ownership” would really be bourgeois ownership and the economic planning would be for the benefit of the bourgeoisie first and foremost.
A similar story in a socialist society with markets and private ownership. If you have a society dominated by public ownership and someone decides to open a shop, where do they get the land, the raw materials, permission for that shop, etc? If they get everything from the public sector, then they exist purely by the explicit approval by the public sector, they don’t have real autonomy. The business may be internally run privately but would be forced to fit into the public plan due to everything around them demanding it for their survival.
Whatever is the dominant aspect of society will shape the subordinated forms. You have to understand societies as all containing internal contradictions and seeking for what is the dominant form in that society that shapes subordinated forms, rather than through an abstract and impossible to realize idealized version of “true socialism”.
Countries like Norway may have things that seemingly contradict capitalism like large social safety nets for workers funded by large amounts of public ownership, but these came as concessions due to the proximity of Nordic countries to the USSR which pressured the bourgeoisie to make concessions with the working class. However, the working class and public ownership and economic planning never became the principal aspect of Norway. The bourgeoisie still remains in control, arguably with a weaker position, but they are still by principal aspect, and in many Nordic countries ever since the dissolution of the USSR, the bourgeoisie has been using that dominant position to roll back concessions.
The argument for China being socialist is not that China has fully achieved some pure, idealized form of socialism, but that China is a DOTP where public ownership alongside the CPC’s Five-Year plans remain the principal aspect of the economy and other economic organization is a subordinated form.
Deng Xiaoping Theory is not a rejection of the economic system the Soviets were trying to build but a criticism of the Soviet understanding socialist development. After the Soviets deemed they had sufficient productive forces to transition into socialism, they attempted to transition into a nearly pure socialist society within a very short amount of time, and then declared socialist construction was completed and the next step was to transition towards communism.
Deng Xiaoping Theory instead argues that socialism itself has to be broken up into development stages a bit like how capitalism also has a “lower” and “higher” phase, so does socialism. The initial stage is to the “primary stage” of underdeveloped socialism, and then the main goal of the communist party is to build towards the developed stage of socialism. The CPC disagreed that the Soviets had actually completed their socialist construction and trying to then build towards communism was rushing things far faster than what the level of productive forces of the country could sustain and inevitably would lead to such great internal contradictions in the economic system to halt economic development.
The argument was not a rejection of the Marxist or Marxist-Leninist understanding of what socialism is, but a disagreement over the development stages, viewing socialism’s development as much more gradual and a country may remain in the primary stage like China is currently in for a long, long time, Deng Xiaoping speculated even 100 years.
I recall reading somethings from Mao where he criticized the Marxian understanding of communism, but not from the basis of it being wrong, but it being speculative. He made the argument that Marx’s detailed analysis of capitalism was only possible because Marx lived in a capitalist society and could see and research its development in real time, therefore Mao was skeptical the current understanding of communism would remain forever, because when you actually try to construct it you would inevitably learn far more than you could speculate about in the future, have a much more detailed understanding of what it is in concrete reality and what its development stages look like.
In a sense, that’s the same position the modern CPC takes towards socialism, that the Soviets and Mao rushed into socialism due to geopolitical circumstances and did not have time to actually fully grasp what socialist development would look like in practice, and Deng Xiaoping Theory introduces the concept of the primary stage of socialism based on their experience actually trying to implement it under Mao.
Despite common misconception, the CPC’s position is indeed that China is currently socialist, not “will be socialist in 2049” or whatever. The argument is that China is in the primary stage of socialism, a system where socialist aspects of the political and economic system have become the main body but in a very underdeveloped form.
EDIT: just to be clear the above is by u/aimixin
I, in general, agree with all of this, you should be posting this at CatholicSocialist, not me. My general criticisms of Marx’s social revolutionary model are ones that he recognized himself later in life (and would be incorporated into Lenin’s labor aristocracy critiques as well), which is that it is the periphery proletariat and peasantry that has more revolutionary attitude and need to organize and create a social revolution. He just never actually published them, so I struggle to really call them a part of Marx’s ‘social revolution model’.
My general description of China as ‘left-liberal capitalist’ stems from the fact that while the party holds the vast majority share of political power in the country, many of those party members are members of bourgeoise, though not even close to a majority, with none of them making up the upper echelon of the party. However, notably, they are almost entirely made up of members of the industrial or petite-bourgeoise, not the FIRE or tech sectors, which is an unspeakably enormous improvement over the Western neoliberal model that fits incredibly neatly into Adam Smith’s idealized version of classical industrial capitalism described in the Wealth of Nations, which Marx saw as a clear and total upgrade to the feudal mode of production.
That being said, I am perfectly content to call China ‘first-stage socialism’ when not in mixed company, but ultimately these stages are rather arbitrary, and it will be seen what happens when China actually achieves it’s destiny and breaks the shackles put around it by the U.S. I generally am in good faith about it, as I have seen factory conditions all over the place and China’s are, in general, much better than your average place, and the proletariat seem to be mostly in high-spirits and believing in the project and the government and their ability to change what the government is doing if it is doing something they don’t like. It’s a completely different attitude than the U.S. and it is completely alien to my experience in any other Western country. Even our most ‘patriotic’ chuds think that the government is out to screw them, so it is weird to see a patriotic nationalism that actually believes that government can and does do good things. Whatever their central mode of production, they are very clearly trying to achieve communism.
We all hope. In all honesty it seems like Xi actually believes and the fact that Chinese leadership is confident in him as their leader gives me a lot of hope. I would hate to see China devolve into another neoliberal dead end but given how well materialist-based development has served them it’s hard to see that happening.
That said there will eventually be a big painful moment where they have to deal with the liberal elements and we are all going to be sitting on the sidelines wishing the best. You know, when we’re not busy riding around in Priuses stocked with miniguns stealing breast milk from milk town
I, in general, agree with all of this, you should be posting this at CatholicSocialist, not me.
I’m confused by this because I was replying to CatholicSocialist? I wasn’t trying to come at you personally, not even indirectly. just wanted to make that clear. that piece is originally by u/aimixin (RIP) I will edit in attribution
They do? Good thing America isn’t literally built on slaves and still held up by slaves,
You know slavery is fucking legal here right?
What is wrong with you, if you really believe that China has slaves like that you should be furious at America too
CHINA ACKSHUALLY HAD LES SLAVES LIKE USA AND MY OWN SHITHOLE HURRR JUST TRUST ME BRO!
shut the fuck up canuck lmfao your country is built on one huge indigenous mass grave
Hey since you’re refusing to answer in the other thread, you claimed that you supported Donbas independence and also stated that you would have less (but not presumably zero) problem with Russia “only” invading them.
I asked how, if the DPR and LPR were the legitimate governments of the Donbas, and they invited Russia, Russia could possibly have invaded them at all and you responded to a bunch of other ones and not that one, probably because you’d basically walked into admitting you were acting in bad faith for the whole thread?
Anyways can you explain here how Russia could invade a state that was asking them to send soldiers?
This community is hilarious because everyone acts like they’re edgy cutting edge memers but all I’ve seen is PPB posted 40+ times, one copy pasta strawmanning libs, and three posts about how much fun it is to own the libs
Like I get circle jerking is fun but there is such thing as being bad at it. And I don’t think this community is nearly as smart or funny as they think they are
And I mean come on you gotta PPB in reply to this! It’s so funny! How could you not??
And I mean come on you gotta PPB in reply to this! It’s so funny! How could you not??
Yeah, you’re right
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Do… Do you think you are clever for complaining about stale memes? Or that maybe the point is to, idk, annoy you?
This community is hilarious
“I like it that/it’s funny that” prefaces to rageposting don’t hide the rage.
And I mean come on you gotta PPB in reply to this! It’s so funny! How could you not??
You don’t deserve anything better with your tier cliche-ridden smug-about-nothing mediocrity.
we’ve definitely had better threads lol
this thread kinda rides the line between “are we just dunking?” vs “are we actually discussing?” and ends up not really being either
Remind me, what other socialist state is getting the world out from under the thumb of US hegemony?
Damn where is America imprisoning and executing billionaires alongside harsh anti corruption campaigns in the government, maybe I’ll move there
Li: At the moment, the Chinese the party state has proven an extraordinary ability to change. I mean, I make the joke: “in America you can change the political party, but you can’t change the policies. In China you cannot change the party, but you can change policies.” So, in the past 66 years, China has been run by one single party. Yet the political changes that have taken place in China in these past 66 years have been wider, and broader, and greater than probably any other major country in modern memory.
Pilger: So in that time China ceased to be communist. Is that what you’re saying?
Li: Well, China is a market economy, and it’s a vibrant market economy. But it is not a capitalist country. Here’s why: there’s no way a group of billionaires could control the Politburo as billionaires control American policy-making. So in China you have a vibrant market economy, but capital does not rise above political authority. Capital does not have enshrined rights. In America, capital — the interests of capital and capital itself — has risen above the American nation. The political authority cannot check the power of capital. That’s why America is a capitalist country, and China is not.
How can you even be a Catholic and not pro-west? The literal state religion of the Western Roman Empire. The last vestige of the Roman empire. Spread by the sword throughout the world. Housed in Rome itself, the vile cesspit whose progeny still despoil and exploit this world. Real Jesus heads would never be down with a vile empire coopting his message like that.
