Reganoff2 [none/use name]

Um, the governor is essentially a figurehead position that is subordinate to the Party secretary. That is true in every autonomous region. A Tibetan has never been Party secretary. Indeed in comprehensive studies of the local Party personnel, historians have argued that basically most major Party positions have always been Han despite Tibetans making up a decent percentage of lower level cadres.

The point is not that Tibet’s conditions pre revolution were terrible. But I might note that you all are basically saying that an area the size of Western Europe was entirely a hellhole. That shit is deeply ignorant. There were areas of Tibet with slavery, and likewise there were areas full of relatively progressive reformers. What the CCP initially wanted to do was prop up local reformers and you’ll note to that end they worked very heavily with the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama. What changed was that progressive reformers grew disenchanted with how little say they actually had following 1956 when policies took a harsher tone, thus the rebellion and the Dalai Lama fleeing, CIA involvement etc.

The point is this - the CCP admits itself that it took Xinjiang and Tibet to secure the rest of China. The risk of balkanization was too great. Hell I am inclined to agree with that. But the charge that they were there just to spread revolution and to enlighten the local populace is pretty much the same argument that the British made with India. It is dumb. I am sorry, if you believe in a straight up violation of all local autonomy and sovereignty for a vision of unilinear progress WITHOUT also accepting that there was a lot of cynicism involved, then you are blatantly misreading history.

Parenti is good but he is not a historian - there is a shit ton of work by both Western and Chinese historians on Tibet before and after the Revolution and the picture is significantly more complicated than you guys paint it to be.

This is incredibly funny to me for a few reasons, namely that the Bush administration basically initially designated ETIM as a terrorist organization as a concession to the Chinese in exchange for using airfields in Central Asia and limiting critique of the US war in Iraq. ETIM were a fairly small fry ‘mujahideen’ group that kicked up a fuss briefly in a small township in Xinjiang before operating very small groups in Afghanistan…As a consequence of the designation, many Uyghur organizations that had previously nothing to do with Islamism or even much in the way of separatism were suddenly grouped into an umbrella group UNDER the ETIM, which was basically a green light from the Bush administration for China to securitize Xinjiang and crack down on dissenting factions under the label of the global War on Terror.

AND of course as a kicker, ETIM went from small fry shits to getting some major cred as an Islamist organization worthy of opposition from both the US AND China, so once discontent grew in Xinjiang as a result of all these new policies, they had their arms wide open, thus all their atrocities in Syria. Another consequence of the mindlessness of the US’s War on Terror, and obviously now just a good way to irritate the Chinese.

Or Muslims, don’t forget the Muslims.

Perhaps but those feelings long outstrip current day ‘identity politics’. Even much of the policies designed in theory to help workers, such as some of the unionization drives in the 30s, helped white workers disproportionally above black ones, precisely to prevent them from feeling ‘left out’. Any concession to black people or workers cannot be seen as ‘not giving a shit about rural whites’ otherwise we are accepting that 1. The dems really do pander to black people, which is certifiably false and 2. It is worth abandoning commitments to racial justice and equality to appease a minority of white rural people (not all certainly) that will not be happy if any attention is given to POC people ever.

I’ve lived in the American south (South Carolina) and the English North, which has a similar feel in some respects. I am not a stranger to the people you are talking about. Nor am I saying we cannot reach people just because they are reactionary. Reactionary is not even, as I see it, a value judgement. It is simply a product of the dire material conditions you have outlined.

But let us not pretend that racism or xenophobia play no role whatsoever in the attraction that certain groups within the very broad category of ‘white working class’ have to the Republican Party. Again, this is why I mentioned false consciousness. It is really easy to convert even people who had unions and good jobs and care about worker’s rights etc to a reactionary cause if certain conditions are right, which you have outlined. But equally I think we also underestimate how much sway racial narratives and ideas of parochial communities have for people, to the extent that even if you do put good choices up to them, they may not often take it. I canvassed for Corbyn in 2017 even before Brexit shattered him. Plenty of people in the English North were willing to abandon Labour on the grounds of racism alone (me being brown did not help).

That isn’t a reason to give up, but it does need to be part of the conversation. Saying simply that all we need is to reach out and give them good policies and they will flip like a switch is a very vulgar type of materialism that also does little credit to these people or their agency. We need to educate, we need to radicalize, and we need to also combat reactionary tendencies when we see them.

The class interests are of course real and the Dems will never realize it, but part of materialist analysis is also understanding hegemony and reification of cultural norms that spawned out of material interests long gone. That’s how you get false consciousness - people are willing to act against their best interests precisely because they have been inculcated to believe they are better than the other race, religion, state etc. It is ultimately foolish to not accept that there are deeply reactionary currents in this country that have gripped working people, particularly white rural working people, in such false consciousness.

While I agree that yes clearly by a lot of metrics life has gotten better for a lot of people in China, this premise supposes that life was not getting better in the Maoist system too. The economy was growing at a very steady rate (outside of the idiocy of the Great Leap anyway), services were slowly expanding, infrastructure was being built, life expectancy getting longer etc. The point is not to compare Maoist China to a China today where it followed the Korean model of basically opening up aspects of the country’s market and labor force open to foreign players thus creating huge growth, but to other countries in the Global South ie India. India was more developed in 1950 than China, but by the end of the decade was far outstripped, let alone by the end of the 70s.

So the question is would these successes have continued? People make the point that living standards in other socialist countries stopped getting better but China had something they didn’t - a massive population and internal market that, coupled with total state control over land, could really keep growth peddling along. No doubt that without Dengism you wouldn’t have had huge growth, but we have to remember the maxim of capitalism: growth and development in one place means the underdevelopment and exploitation of another. Lots of coastal provinces and cities got incredibly rich off of poor nongmin from places like Anhui or Gansu. 400 million peasants became proletarianized, and essentially because of the way the hukou restricts access to services they are also second class citizens and are told as much too with the whole suzhi discourse.

So yes I think we can say in some respects that sure the jury is out on whether or not poverty in socialism versus riches in temporary capitalism is better or not, but this also presumes that the CCP is absolutely acting in good faith when it says it is moving to somewhere else. You mention the healthcare system but even the current five year plan says very little about nationalizing care, so much as they are hoping for a hodge podge of private and public care. Let alone the fact that yes, much of the country’s culture has changed. Becoming rich is more important in a lot of circles than being active in society or politics. Hell, most people have no relation to politics in anyway. Politics is reserved for the technocrats who run things - not the masses. Mao’s genius was understanding that orthodox MLism will always degrade into some sort of weird personality based organization or sheer bureaucratism without the mass line and people’s input in daily politics. There is no such input now, and the class character of the CCP because of how rich sectors of the country have gotten is entirely different than 1949. How can we really know that socialism is still the goal? Are there any real movements to decommodification, work place democracy, economic equality, ending the surveillance state, reforming prisons and penal laws, empowering progressive cultural movements etc? As someone who deeply loves China from the language to the cultures, I can’t really see any of that.

So what you have is then, okay, a country that is willing to rein in capital’s excesses, sometimes by force if it needs to for the nationalist interest, but ultimately has no stake in fueling class war (one thing that I am always reminded of when visiting the country - even the phrase class conflict is barely used anymore, in favor of the language of peace and compromise in the workplace etc), is thoroughly depoliticized, and frankly growing increasingly chauvinist. That does not strike me as very different than South Korean managerial capitalism, save for the obvious exception that one country is an opponent of the US and one is not. But I am also reminded always of the fact that many leftists, particularly leftists of color, believed that the Japanese Empire would wind up becoming a progressive force because of its economic hostility to the United States and liberalism. The CCP is of course different, but it really remains to be seen what they will do to help working people imo

I agree with you there but for different reasons - the Secret Speech itself was not wrong, but the fact that it got out into the West allowed it to become fodder against the Soviet Union. Interestingly Mao made the same critique - that largely what Khrushchev was saying was right in the sense that Mao also agreed that Stalin had made crucial errors and was also principally against what he saw as a personality cult, but that with Khrushchev having voiced these critiques, communist parties in the West that had tied their legitimacy to Stalin were suddenly done for. Mao was correct, the Secret Speech was a mistake in how it was done.

The 1965 reforms were obviously a terrible idea, but then they came from a decidedly anti Khrushchev faction that was wary of endemic economic issues. I think this represents a marked shift to technocracy in the Soviet Union which was ultimately terrible for everyone, but I am not sure that we can make a link between that and Khrushchev himself considering that he was ousted BECAUSE he was seen as not ‘fit’ to ‘modernize’ the economy.

But also I think in many ways even had the Secret Speech not been made, there were just certain fundamentals about the Soviet position in Europe that were just going to lead to dissent and splintering. It is a shame. Much of it could have been handled and I think defanged but ultimately being besieged by capitalist powers all the time and from every side just made all the 20th century socialist experiments wary, and I can’t blame them.

Yes, I’m not denying that there was obviously tremendous anti-Semitism or callous nationalism in the movement. Many Hungarian Jews left for Israel as a consequence of the violence (many left the Soviet Union too, but we’ll ignore that for now - those dastardly ‘rootless cosmopolitans’, am I right? ). What I am saying though is it wasn’t a major driving force, and enough archival research has been done to prove that point. Hobsbawm, who was in fact one of the original tankies, talks about it at length here: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v28/n22/eric-hobsbawm/could-it-have-been-different Haaretz discusses the divisions amongst the Jewish community without undercutting he violence: www.haaretz.com/amp/1.4924257

Again the point here is that even people very sympathetic to the Soviet intervention do realize that ultimately how it was played was wrong - that it set up the divisions that would cause the Soviets themselves to collapse. Obviously Hungary was a deeply reactionary place in many respects, I mean the whole region was, but this was hardly just a matter of “the Brits created a color revolution that wanted to murder all the communists” particularly as a lot of the people who went and lynched Jewish officials were supposed Hungarian communists themselves.