I think it makes some points. Does anyone more knowledgeable on this subject have a different take?
How’d you find this post? You’re welcome to stay here, our community is a lot better than whatever you’ve got on Quora and IG. Just know most of us don’t support Gonzalo. Just because someone calls themselves communist doesn’t mean they’re worth our support. Should we support Jim Jones? La Rouche? Caleb Maupen? Besides just understanding cults you should understand the line struggle between right and left deviations. It should be clear that the PCP were a pretty far left deviation. I’d rather support a slightly right deviationist China that continues to improve people’s lives and counter US hegemony than a random guerrilla group that killed random people motivated by hatred of people even slightly to the right of them (that failed).
Beside that our ideologies aren’t much different, so I’d hope you’d remain open and converse here.
I searched this site because a sudden rise in traffic to our site, and especially my article which you shared above, came from here. This community doesn’t seem too promising considering all the bourgeois and imperialist myths they believe about the PCP, but I’ll stay here and see how it goes.
The PCP was not a cult like Jim Jones’s group was. There’s a clear difference between a party working to liberate the people in a place where most parties turned electoralist and capitulated to the state, and a government that has turned bourgeois rather than simply being “slightly right deviationist”. The US “improved people’s lives” for quite some time because that’s how development works; China could have continued on the socialist path with a planned economy and worked just fine, just as the Stalin era saw the most massive improvement in development for the USSR, but the bourgeoisie seized power and reversed that trend. The PCP was not a “random guerrilla group”; it was a revolutionary party with support from the oppressed masses.
Here’s a document with even more sources than what I used in my article: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16bue8TQo-knWAKlkpuNBnePOs7j7KDh11aDoNa_dPO0/edit
I also have a playlist with some decent documentaries that Bad Empanada would never show: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1otLYuSiLBdsx6Wu0hRxdT_T2RLKpGAY
A bourgeois government would not eliminate poverty. The US has more poverty than China at this point. Global poverty’s on the rise if you take China out of the statistics. They are the only reason it’s going down. I didn’t point to Jim Jones as the same kind of thing, I just meant don’t believe everyone when they tell you they’re a communist. Honestly Jones probably wasn’t even some random dude who got a following, but an op. I’ll take a look at your sources.
The same statistics that say China’s poverty is reducing claim that people under Mao lived in poverty. Poverty is defined as lacking basic needs, and while Mao-era China was still relatively underdeveloped, the people were not poor because they got basic needs met. Deng Xiaoping commodified things that used to be decommodified, ended subsidies for goods, and overall caused inflation of most prices and a decline in wages. Speaking of wages, Deng re-commodified labor-power, and now China has a higher unemployment rate than the US; what sort of socialist society has the purchase and sale of labor-power?! Commodity production is inevitable in underdeveloped socialism, but there are also plenty of de-commodified goods and services; the capitalist-roaders eliminated them. If you’re not a fan of Khrushchev, you cannot support Deng.
Capitalist production is the highest form of commodity production. Commodity production leads to capitalism only if there is private owner-ship of the means of production, if labour power appears in the market as a commodity which can be bought by the capitalist and exploited in the process of production, and if, consequently, the system of exploitation of wageworkers by capitalists exists in the country. Capitalist production begins when the means of production are concentrated in private hands, and when the workers are bereft of means of production and are compelled to sell their labour power as a commodity.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1951/economic-problems/ch03.htm
Our Gonzalite friend is wrong about an number of things, but there is real criticism to be made about Deng radically increasing poverty by undercutting the systems installed under Mao that brought poverty to low levels. The “Chinese miracle” was in many respects solving problems that it itself caused and is a sort of liberal historical revisionism, though of course the more contemporary extreme poverty eradication initiative made real headway that was not made under Mao.
