you know how people, especially on twitter, try and share their absolute dogshit takes without a care for humility, just unbribled stubbornness
everybody seem so full of themselves and I just can’t bring myself to trust anyone unless they show a hint of doubt over their own thoughts, and that’s flat out absent from most social media
idk, I don’t think I did a good jb describing what I feel, it’s hard to accurately put into words
but like, do you have stuff you usually keep to yourself, because like you know the thought isn’t well rounded or something and you don’t want to say something incorrect. or like interrogations about stuff you can’t really answer by yourself
Personally, I’m slowly coming to terms with the idea that I simply like China as a country
for all it’s flaws and contradiction, I like reading about it, and I’m curious to see how it’s gonna develop. I think I will eventually learn the language.
I know it is not any helpful for you, but it i a sentiment I wanted to share :)
How many people actually know enough about China? Everyone here knows plenty of U.S. history (+ their own Western country if they aren’t a yank) and can read, write and speak its language. Its culture is everywhere, people here follow its news and they roughly know the mentality of various U.S. population groups. Can anyone say the same about China? You’d have to live there in order to consume as much media about China the way we do about the U.S.
there’s at least one less now. they just nationalized the businesses of one for corruption and put him in jail
Ok? Western countries occasionally arrest rich people for blatant corruption as well.
Have you gone and read what Deng Xiaoping said in his speeches? What do you have reservations about? Have you read what Xi Jinping said and upholds? Socialism with Chinese Characteristics is socialism. It is a socialism that develops within capitalism and uses it as a lever; it lets capitalists exist, but not control the economy. https://dengxiaopingworks.wordpress.com/ I think articles like these: https://dengxiaopingworks.wordpress.com/2013/03/18/to-uphold-socialism-we-must-eliminate-poverty/ say it all. A good review of China’s Xi and the direction it is taking, for starters, and from the enemy’s mouth, is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Sino/comments/i9l1v0/faith_in_the_coming_collapse_of_china_is_shaking/ Since it’s from ‘the economist’, overlook any nonsense like “Nothing good, say critics at home and abroad. He has brought reforms that liberalised the economy to a halt and has smothered market forces, returning to a top-heavy state-dominated growth model which looks distinctly creaky. Private companies have rushed to set up party committees with an increasing say over strategy. Their once-swashbuckling bosses have adopted lower profiles. The title of a recent book by Nicholas Lardy of the Peterson Institute, an American think-tank, sums up the worries: “The State Strikes Back”.” In which ‘nothing good’ means ‘nothing bad’ because all he describes is literally stifling the right-leanings of the Party and society. Anyways, just pop around r/sino and read Deng and Xi as well as seeing how the market is controlled by the State and you’ll see how ‘Marxism changed China; China changed Marxism’. I think it’s also important to mention that 2020/2021 is China’s zero poverty target, while 2049/2050 is China’s ‘moderately prosperous society’ target, which means a modern, developed to the extent of the great capitalist countries, in which everyone enjoys, yes, a moderately prosperous life, and is corresponding with the end of the first stage, aka socialism. Xi really talks about this and it’s not just for show, you can tell he’s read and he knows. Playing within capitalism is risky, and Deng knew it, but I think generally the direction they are going in is spectacular.
Lots of people wanting to decide whether China is good or bad, very few actual analyses that are relevant to their audience. I don’t get the impression that people stanning or attacking China (on this site) have any damn clue what it’s like, what the internal political workings are, what social currents are at play, etc. Just idealism.
They’re just another empire, in the same category as the USA, really. In a few hundred years, we will probably view the 20th century as an unusual period, because it was a time of Chinese weakness. Should you support them because they are a rival to America? IDK I’m pretty sure America’s dominance will naturally fade due to internal contradiction and changing world conditions, so I don’t see why you would.
Despite my memeing, I honestly am unsure of why we should uphold the legacy of Stalin. Like his theoretical contributions aren’t groundbreaking, his statescraft wasn’t amazing, the economic gains he contributed probably would have come from any Leninist in his position, even the war effort wasn’t him single-handedly taking on the Nazis. I dunno but he just seems banal at best and honestly kinda shitty at worst. Def have an open mind about him but…well meh honestly.
One helpful exercise is – instead of asking if some person/country/policy is good in a vacuum – asking if it was good compared to what came before it, if it was good compared to what else was happening in the world at the time, and if it was good compared to other realistic options. The basic premise is you can’t go from a terrible society to a utopia overnight, so we really should be judging people/countries/policies on how much they move the ball forward compared to how much they realistically could have moved the ball forward.
For Stalin, this would mean comparing the USSR under him to Imperial Russia and all the problems created by WWI, something like ~17 capitalist countries invading, and the Russian Civil War (in short, none of this was a good time); comparing the USSR under him to contemporary peer countries (other major powers in of the period, with some allowance for the fact that they were more industrialized and didn’t go through post-WWI invasions and civil wars); and comparing his actions to what else he realistically could have done.
I don’t think he comes out looking too bad after that sort of analysis, especially if one looks at the positives and not just the negatives.
Sometimes I wonder if I jump to violence too quickly, wouldn’t surprise me given my history, but the only people who ever call me out on it are complete turn-the-other-cheek pacifists. Leads me to think “of course they would say I’m too eager to start swinging, they think violence is never ok”. Makes it hard to tell
Well that was rambly as fuck…
If a stateless communist society is even possible.
Like you think the whole leftist idea of communism could come into fruition but be an impermanent thing or like you think there would be a different thing that people would symbolically call communism out of pattern association?
I think it’s probably possible. I’m completely certain we can’t just replace the state with nothing. I have ideas what could replace it, but I’m very, very uncertain about those.
I’m just spitballing but a “state” in Marx’s terms is explicitly a tool of class control, is it not? I think that opens up the door for, like, free associations of people in the higher stage to build institutions that were might call a government but Marx wouldn’t call a state? I might be wrong here tho
A state is an entity with a monopoly on legitimate violence, which uses that monopoly to create and enforce laws.
Getting rid of the state is a good thing, but power still exists and has a tendency to concentrate, and the natural outcome of this in agrarian civilizations seems to be states. There needs to be some other method of allocating power, which is resistant to concentration, or we end up in this same mess again.
My best idea is a network of narrowly defined task-specific trust/expertise hierarchies (you trust your doctor’s expertise on health, your doctor trusts someone else as a bigger expert, eventually there’s a panel of medical researchers that set the policy all the doctors are following). There are so many different ones of these structures that there’s no room for one to start growing new responsibilities and powers for itself.
The phenomena on social media you mentioned where where everyone proclaims their opinions (whether wrong or not) with full confidence is so disorienting. If you can’t scrutinize them because you don’t know either or you aren’t paying attention, one naturally tends to agree with someone speaking with authority. Having hundreds of anonymous people do this to your brain in the span of an hour over text makes it so hard to call bullshit. I mean I still do but thinking about it now makes me realize I have no strategy for it. Idk how many stupid opinions or falsehoods I’ve swallowed whole on Reddit.
