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tfw you legit want to ask if the cpc has a history of fulfilling their stretch goals
Going to make a post that will anger both hardline Marxist-Leninists who hate Dengists and weirdo Western leftists who think Stalinism and Dengism aren’t real socialism yet simultaneously both state capitalism
I think the prospect of synthesizing the original orthodox Marxist belief in the necessity of a stage of bourgeois capitalist development with the Leninist conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat is actually extremely good and based and intriguing
National liberation is a pretty key struggle, and I think there is every reason to believe that developing a national bourgeoisie is helpful in that struggle so long as they don’t gain undue influence in politics. Even the phillipines communist party, no fan of China, supports national liberation through the national democratic front. You can’t develop a communist society while imperialism is the principle dialectic in the world.
Love or hate Deng or China, it is undeniable that they are creating a multipolar world that is making it possible for other countries to follow their own socialist path.
The problem ultimately I think is in trying to discern what ‘undue’ influence is. I think what bothers me about this view is that it pretty much erases the historical fact that 1. Maoist China existed, 2. It survived despite imperialism and aggression from both superpowers, 3. The nationalist bourgeoisie were liquidated after New Democracy properly came to an end in 1954. What made China a success in my view compared to say India is in fact that they realized that the bourgeoisie could never be CURTAILED so much as they had to be abolished, which is why Mao was so paranoid about capitalist roaders propping up - the revolution would never be complete without them being sequestered from society.
In my view, what you have in China is a situation where many of the elites that Mao and the left of the Party disdained are suddenly in a much better situation. As a personal anecdote - I knew kids who joined the Party in college because it meant that they would be able to get better finance jobs. The Party has become a sort of quasi corporate entity in that as an institution it doesn’t have a hostility to capital per se so much as it uses certain language to proclaim that it is against capital’s dominance. But my bet is that of Mao’s: an iota of capitalist influence will eventually corrupt any political project to overthrow it.
As a personal anecdote - I knew kids who joined the Party in college because it meant that they would be able to get better finance jobs.
Why is that a bad thing? Would you prefer if success in finanace wasn’t contingent on joinging the party?
some good shit, but they need to strive for universial health care, not just “multi tiered” whatever that means.
Yeah when China does “affordable” or “multi-tier” it’s fine. It’s socialism. Its the exact same exploitation, but the rhetoric sounds better so it’s socialism.
it’s 5 years though
by multi-tiered i think they mean accessibility to/affordability of different levels of treatment, complexity wise
to use a somewhat large country (brazil) with universal health care (public option called SUS) as an example: we have it on paper, but in practice we lack doctors and it’s really, really hard to execute it in “deep brazil” (mainly the countryside) - existing doctors don’t want to go there, there’s barely any useful infrastructure, etc
another issue is that, when it comes to specialized treatments and exams, where the technology is much more expensive, supply often doesn’t meet demand
to make things worse, these technologies also need technical training to be used, so sometimes we have the machines but no one who can properly and safely use them
now, this is for a somewhat large country with a rural population of 14%; imagine a massive country like china, with a rural population of 40% and vastly underdeveloped regions more to the center (as they had been focusing mostly on the coastal cities until recently)
and still they already have 95% coverage for basic treatment, so i guess they’re doing ok? i mean, my main point is that i wouldn’t criticize this without really knowing in detail what they’re doing wrong, because in my country we literally have universal health care in our constitution, but regardless of our printed words our actual conditions haven’t allowed us to make this a reality
This is all well and good but I think what we ignore here is that China had a system of universal healthcare before. It was dismantled, I think frankly quite haphazardly, and suddenly talk of that old system is dismissed out of hand as unachievable. And it was not a joke medical system either! It accomplished huge strides in infant care, women’s morality, basic health outcomes etc. All for free and entirely uncommodified. Whereas now the real issue is that for many people even if ‘access’ exists if is curtailed by hukou, employment status, quality of care in shitty public hospitals, doctors having extremely limited time to see patients, etc. There is a whole phenomenon of mobs beating doctors up because they prescribe medicine that is pushed by insurance sponsors (like the US lol). Saying that things will change slowly ignores how quickly the state was able to change things before, which in my opinion is just a matter of a vastly changed political economy.
this is why i mentioned basic healthcare
the system during the mao period managed to do that really well - this is doable, since whenever the material requirements are low enough you can change things through sheer force of will, as the barefoot doctors certainly did and got huge gains from it
but it wasn’t universal healthcare - or do you think the barefoot doctors had access to the latest chemotherapy medicines? radiotherapy machines? MRIs? respirators, ICUs, and so on
unless you believe traditional chinese medicine can take care of this stuff, which it obviously can’t, there are very real material limitations and ideals can only take us as far as they allow us to
my criticism to the reforms was shutting off free access to basic treatment in the short term, because this, as you said, could have easily been provided - but i haven’t read their justifications for it
I like the part where the only mention of socialism is tied to civility.
Yes, I’m sure the Global Time’s English infographic is a good way to gauge this (it’s fucking not).
Socialism is when you just do capitalism and make vague references to that changing someday.