Permanently Deleted
Because I live in the west, and am exposed to China Bad propaganda, I am a Dengist now, with Xi chsrcteristics. Similar those who dare questio the absurd theory of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” those who question my somewhat reactonary point of view should be purged
Edit: I see this has hit a nerve. They hated her because she told the truth.jpg
Antinatalism
Anprim
Kazcynzkites
Russia, Belorussia, Syria, Iran are socialist
Capitalist phase of development can be skipped
No such thing as class traitors
Anarchist Society dealing with climate change
SU was not state capitalist
CPC will bring about global communism
Anti-Revisionists of all flavors
Social democrats of all types
Vaush
Supercapitalism
Yes, these are just things I don’t like and not necessarily ‘ultra left’ but that term is stupid because none of the things in this thread are ‘ultra left’ they’re usually liberal or nationalist takes disguising themselves as socialism.
If ‘right’ and ‘left’ are meaningful terms at all, they should refer to ‘right’ being closer to the currently established hierarchy, and the relative distance away from ‘right’, the ‘left’, then representing the degree of change away from the present society.
Mostly agree except antinatalism. I’m not gonna yell at anyone for having kids or anything; but I know I’d have been better off not having been born and the world in general is pretty shit, so I can’t force that on someone else.
Antinatalism as a personal choice is fine, I’d probably adopt instead of making a new baby myself, my problem and I assume op’s problem is with enforced Antinatalism. Also with “antinatalism isn’t just a reaction to capitalism it would be true even after socialism is fully established in the whole world and should be the enforced policy of socialist states”.
Yes. Something I want to add is I think a lot of people don’t want to or feel like they can’t satisfyingly have children, and need a justification for it. In times of system failure or collapse or even just general squeeze on the working class, people will stop having kids or have less kids, because of the economic stress. I think a lot of us are feeling that economic stress and logically deciding not I have kids bc we could only offer a life offering less than they would deserve, and look for a justification for it. This was the case for me, when I was an antinatalist. Now that I’m past it, perhaps I am unfair to those who still are. I don’t mean any judgment to anyone choosing not to have children, I probably won’t, or I’ll adopt.
Antinatalism
I really hate admitting it but I struggle to talk myself out of being low key antinatal.
It just seems supremely arrogant to force a being into existence. Yeah they may have an awesome life, but they may have a life of suffering and pain, you have no way of knowing for sure. Even if we lived in fucking Star Trek communism there’s still a chance their life could be one of pain and misery so I really don’t feel okay taking that gamble just for the satisfaction of having a kinda cute sorta clone of myself.
Being a socialist is about wanting to build a better future for human kind. If creating new humans is arrogant and shitty because their life might be bad, we’re basically saying that actually the human race should go extinct. Misanthropy and socialism are incompatible.
Like I said in my other reply here, antinatalism as a personal choice is fine. If you feel arrogant making a baby, don’t make a baby.
This is a disingenuous framing. I can think that having children is a bad idea and still want to build a better world for the people who are alive. I’m not anti-natalist because I’m a misanthrope, it’s because I care about people and don’t want them to suffer through a life that they never wanted in the first place.
I wish I had never been born. My life has been utterly miserable and it isn’t the sort of thing I’d ever want another being to suffer through. It’s not arrogance to want to spare others from suffering. My parents did not feel it was arrogant to have me, but they really should have. They’re emotionally immature people who were absolutely not capable of good parenting and of course that’s exactly the sort of people eager to have children without thinking through the consequences of choosing to bring someone into existence.
To be clear, I’m not advocating for enforcing anti-natalism or anything like that. It’s not something that could ever be ethically done even if it was possible. I just don’t care to be accused of arrogance or misanthropy because I think forcing other people to go through what I have is a shitty thing to do.
Capitalist phase of development can be skipped
So this has like 12 million qualifiers but it was supposed to be in a situation where at least one of the capitalist imperial powers, if not the hegemon, would have a socialist revolution and could help a still semi-feudal peasant society skip (or at least significantly shorten) the capitalist stage of development because they could give them the necessary means of production to construct the material basis for a socialist society. Not, as is often claimed, that you could just skip from feudalism to socialism in one country on its own. Engels hints at this in the preface to the russian edition of the manifesto:
Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina, though greatly undermined, yet a form of primeaval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution such as constitutes the historical evolution of the West? The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development.
Now obviously this hypothetical never came to pass and it might not have worked anyway, since you wouldn’t have had capital destroy the traditional social structures out of which you could build something resembling socialism. Instead you would likely have to have an alternative transition stage of development which would accomplish the same things but (hopefully) without the same levels of immiseration and exploitation that capitalism inflicts on a society. But it doesn’t really matter now because there aren’t any semi-feudal peasant societies anymore so the whole argument is moot. As was this comment.
Antinatalism
Still my favorite struggle sesh we’ve had here so far. Outdoor cats is a close second.
Virgil’s cold open about it is still my favorite moment of the whole show
that term is stupid because none of the things in this thread are ‘ultra left’
thank god someone said it. I fucking hate the term ultraleft for this reason.
If ‘right’ and ‘left’ are meaningful terms at all, they should refer to ‘right’ being closer to the currently established hierarchy, and the relative distance away from ‘right’, the ‘left’, then representing the degree of change away from the present society.
there’s a point on the right where they’re no longer trying to preserve the present society and instead reinstitute an older one, but yeah, you’re generally correct.
Idk when some dork posts takes like “NATO overthinking Gaddafi and Libya was good” or “support ISIS against the west” on WSWS I’m going to dunk on them and call them ultras. At that point I don’t really care anymore and I’m not going to engage past petty insults like ultra
those are nationalist takes masquerading with leftist aesthetics. a further left analysis is exactly what’s needed to dismantle them. punching left to own the right is… uhh… what?
The great firewall is good
I don’t know enough about how Chinese censorship compares to capitalist censorship to have a fully-informed viewpoint, but seeing how easily reactionary content spreads on the internet and how active various propaganda mills are, I can certainly see a credible argument against only lightly regulating online spaces. I also get the feeling that a lot of “great firewall” talking points are rooted in the tradition of using free speech as a weapon against the left (it can be used as a weapon against the right, too, but the whole issue is much more complex than “free speech good”).
My favorite are the folks who remain completely uncritical of China.
Like yeah, China is doing some cool communist like stuff, and absolutely we should look to them as one model of how communism can work in large scale in the modern era. Modern communists can learn a lot from some of the things China is doing, and I think that China should be supported in the doing of those things.
BUT.
China is not fully communist, at all, and they are still undoubtedly doing some real fucking awful things. Excusing those things as “it’s part of the transition” or “it takes time” makes you sound like a psycho lib. Remain critical of China please. Just be critical of the correct things, and celebrate the correct things as well.
just curious, what are the awful things they are doing that isn’t uighur related
To pick one, social credit is a little bit questionable in a lot of its implementations. The Great Firewall is another very, very bad practice.
The Chinese fishing fleet is massively subsidized and operates in a lot of African EEZs without regard to international laws, causing the collapse of the local fishing industry and ecosystems.
Failling to protect their culture, I’m sure Gorbatchev would approve the amount of pizza huts they have. Most locally-produced movies are trying to copycat hollywood blockbusters and the music industry ain’t doing better.
My thinking on the firewall has shifted a lot over time. Imagine what a massive problem it could be if every Chinese person was on Facebook, for example - blocking that as an protectionist move and allowing Weibo to grow as the Chinese-owned and -operated alternative was absolutely the right move. And when you consider the censorship that it enables, consider that western corporations do a lot of censorship too - but the difference between western and Chinese censorship is that the Chinese censors are democratically accountable to a larger degree than the western ones, who just happen to own the website in question.
I was also very negative on the Great Firewall for a long time but I’ve come around to the belief that it’s necessary, even if its benefits are completely unintentional.
Even libs understand that fake news is a huge threat to democracy and social cohesion, if the media can’t be trusted to report fairly on Bernie Sanders how can they be trusted to report fairly on Xi Jinping? How much worse would propaganda in the MSM get if the US thought there was a chance it was going to cause domestic unrest in China? If we challenge and critically approach the framework of free press as a conduit for unbiased information that selects for accuracy, then the Great Firewall might be the least bad alternative.
Furthermore, Western tech companies have horrible privacy practices and literally collude with US intelligence services, even US allies like the EU are sick of their shit and are feuding with the US over data taxes. Nurturing Chinese tech companies and keeping the data of Chinese citizens out of the hands of US companies was a very, very prescient move (if intentional).
I’m skeptical of the idea “the free market is bad, except when it comes to the press”. I still have a lot of gripes with the Great Firewall as a concept and its implementation but I also don’t know how to resolve those problems without emboldening the US’s efforts at hybrid warfare.
the reality of the “social credit” system was massively overstated in western media outlets.
It’s not a huge mystery why. The US has been declining for years, after having built inconceivably extensive systems of imperial domination to compete with a superpower that no longer exists. Those systems need to be directed at something, and China, even though it is or was a major trading partner, is best positioned to knock the US out of the #1 spot.
I definitely get WMD flashbacks every time I hear about Uighurs being persecuted in China. I’m not saying it’s not true, but I absolutely don’t trust the sudden concern from the MSM and government given their total indifference to, well everything else.
To be true you have to have evidence
The only evidence is from Adrian Zenz and a think tank NGO owned by the US
And when this evidence is held up to scrutiny it falls apart in seconds or all leads back to far right US paid for organisations who’s literal stated goal is to overthrow China
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/03/26/forced-labor-china-us-nato-arms-industry-cold-war/
https://www.greanvillepost.com/2019/07/22/march-of-the-uyghurs/
https://www.greanvillepost.com/2020/10/15/the-us-is-on-a-path-to-war-with-china-what-is-to-be-done/
Don’t forget that they were literally bombing the Uighurs 2 years ago: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2018/02/10/bombing-of-chinese-separatists-in-afghanistan-is-a-sign-of-how-trumps-war-there-has-changed/
“There will be no safe haven for any terrorist group,” Gen. John Nicholson, the head of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan, said in a statement Thursday. “We continue to hunt them across the country.”
we dont really know yet what the plan is
Comrade, lets not beat about the fucking bush
We’re touchy over China right now because the US is putting patches of a skull and drone bombing China on its soldiers
https://news.antiwar.com/2020/09/29/us-military-patch-depicts-drone-and-skull-over-china/
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2019/11/27/women-under-isil-the-torturers/
yeah
Let me know if you don’t like AJ as a source, to the best of my knowledge they are not a part of the neolib hegemony but I could find a better source that covers this if you wanted me to
