My god, even the best chance for socialism is hopeless because of the dollar. “it’s not doomer because the party could do something different” idgaf day after day it’s more dollars and less long term hope. Nothing China does can matter because all the green energy, all the bnr, all the poverty elimination, all of it is paid for with imperial currency and little to no interest in changing this arrangement from within. The party will talk about win-win arrangements and mutually-beneficial cooperation until the fucking nukes are flying.
The USSR legit helped multiple peoples win their national liberation struggles and then keep their freedom (as free as it gets while being strangled by a global US-led imperialist alliance)
Cuba, Vietnam, Angola, Mozambique, South Africa, Laos, Korea (halfway lol, that one was mostly China though), even a lot of Eastern Europe, not even mentioning all the free aid that was sent to national liberation struggles still in progress to this day (like to the PLO) or that were defeated, even through direct military intervention like in Cuba and Afghanistan
Ofc you know this but the defeat of the USSR wasn't just a defeat of the USSR and it wasn't a tragedy just for that reason, but because it was the defeat of an entire world anti-imperialist movement :(
Even the AES-stans on this site will acknowledge that modern China is not like the USSR in this aspect and that China actively refuses to form an anti-imperialist bloc like the USSR led despite now having a more powerful economy and better diplomatic status than the USSR ever had and despite the increasing aggression from the imperialist powers who can no longer tolerate the very existence of China as any kind of independent power even though China's "opening up" and participation in the world market literally rescued their economies in the 70s and 80s (although BRICS is a good movement in this direction even if completely inadequate)
Idk, I am asking that the "critical support" be a little more critical :3 as things continue to heat up, geopolitically and literally
I used to be cool with and do the China and BRICS "cheerleading" thing but I am more skeptical now. Idk, have been averse to expressing this cuz I have seen so many get dogpiled for even mentioning this kind of thing :/
I'm critical ideologically (and was), but uncritical structurally (world-systems wise) of china. (USSR i mentioned since 70s specifically, they did lots of cool stuff before that, but after that were mainly in holding pattern, not developing further.). And cheerleading is nice, i don't mind it, i just don't place hopes on it changing things in the way or at speed people think. (and hope might be praxis killer in some scenarios)
It's just....... the same ideological tendencies that led to the USSR taking a liberal class-struggle-devoid view of "coexistence" with the West and increasingly led them to some kind of "situationally practical" negative peace until it caused their self-destruction, the same tendencies which people here will rightfully criticize as "Krushchevite revisionism" and which made China break from the Soviet-led bloc, are now reflected in China's internal and external policy and within the CPC's ideological line in a massively bigger way than the USSR and the CPSU ever did. China has just managed to avoid the self-destruction part, probably cuz the West was cool with China as long as they remained a non-threat competitively on the world market and they kept sending extremely cheap input goods to the economy of the West (and we can see the ruling class of the global imperialist bloc is no longer cool with this arrangement from their recent actions toward China but the flow of cheap commodities never stopped so it's probably for the former reason (without getting into implications of what that could mean given that China is now a financial and industrial superpower))
Imo it's not possible to be critical ideologically of China while remaining uncritical structurally (if we assume being "uncritical" is ever a good thing, at least in political economy) cuz one of the basest conclusions of Marxism is that the oppressed classes don't have to remain passive objects to the material conditions of history (which the ruling classes have, until recently, had asserted the most control over) but that we can use ideology to understand these forces and exert influence on them for our own benefit using the state as led by the communist party like in China. The current structure of China and China's role within the larger structure of the imperialist world-system is highly influenced by the ideology of the CPC. Like..... yeah, China was in a particularly difficult situation in the mid-to-early-late 20th century because the CPC had broken all ties with the USSR and "their" (social imperialism or whatever hehe) anti-imperialist bloc and after their attempt to build their own competing bloc wasn't going so well, they willingly chose to cooperate with the West and give the West's economy a massive boost while it was in the middle of completely and finally wrecking the USSR and their bloc, which.... definitely means something about their ideology cuz China didn't just accidentally end up like this (however someone views the goodness or badness of "this"). To criticize ideas on a basis other than relations to other ideas (which we definitely want to do cuz we are materialists) is to criticize their effects on the world, and the world isn't looking too good rn while China isn't doing a whole lot about it despite no longer being powerless to effect it (ofc that assertion is extremely contentious and complicated to get into lol)
And ofc, it depends how we define what "cheerleading" is cuz when I just used it, it was vibes-based lol. What I mean is a whole tendency of this site sometimes to overfocus on the cool things China does like build trains or forgive loans (I do like trains and free stuff :3) while overlooking massively concerning things like the role of capital, especially finance capital, plays in China's economy and the extent to which it has penetrated into the state and the party to not only siphon state resources through state contracts but even through direct corruption or changes that have taken place since the end of the Maoist period like the massively reduced role of central economic planning or agricultural communes and similar local economic organizations in the economy while substituting capital or even the extent to which multinational corporations extract surplus from China to export to the West
Imo it's not even just a tendency of this site but, more broadly, a tendency in the entire western left that didn't immediately out themselves as imperialist chauvinists when the latest cold war against China began. Idk, ofc as someone in the West I will always criticize my country more than China and defend China from one of these "leftists" if they start going off lol. Idk, we have to figure out wtf is going on cuz passively "cheerleading" AES and tepid third-world social democracies or just being a running dog for imperialism isn't gonna help us. I know this site is overly hostile to criticism of China, mostly cuz the site was once was filled with those running dogs who had to get purged but, idk am voicing these feelings for once
Am sry if being too long-winded or unnecessary expositiony of things you already know, is just kinda how I think through stuff
Oh, i meant structurally, as in weight in global economy. Assuming all else equal, getting 2.5 billion people good life (tm), will shift the productive forces in the global south into higher gear, china either consciously (if commies) or unconsciously (if porkies) will have to build out productive capacity in the rest of the world, simultaneously reducing western pie (no sense in being coffee harvester for 0.50 cents an hour if chinese funko pop factory pays 2). While it is not, strictly speaking, good from climate perspective, the alternative from the west is getting murdered on the border, so, let them do their stuff with cheap solar and shit working conditions (or good working conditions), its good in either case, because the alternative is getting shit working conditions and getting killed.
Higher order thinking says capital is not, exactly, sound, profit-wise, but that includes lots of fat they can shed in consulting/advertising/lawyering/lobbying to recover, so ai might give some time there
It's not good in either case imo. Cuz obviously China and the CPC are not comfortable remaining in typical third-world economic conditions of total subjection to the West which excludes this "compromise" situation going on for much longer and if I understand what you mean by like.... a "commie" type or "porkie" type of path of development in the world......
The world is divided again into the imperialist and anti-imperialist blocs, led by the US and China, respectively, cuz the imperial core cannot allow the periphery to exist on an equal relationship without the current imperialist world system shattering and an economic crash, basically total self-destruction of the current economy of the West, like NOTHING ever seen. The contradiction between imperialism and anti-imperialism is irreconcilable, yet the only forces capable of actually permanently resolving the contradiction are the anti-imperialist ones
Results: If imperialism is successful, again, then the nations of the anti-imperialist bloc will be forced back into third-world conditions and total subjection to the West. If anti-imperialism is successful...... there is no imperialist contradiction anymore and the proletariat can actually address climate change and uhhh idk I can't even imagine how incredible that would be, no words
The world is also divided, this time into 2 imperialist camps also led by the US and China, respectively. The CPC has totally given in to its revisionist line, who knows what that looks like yet it is possible. The contradiction between the 2 imperialist camps is irreconcilable and can only be resolved with the destruction of one of them
Results: Possibly world-ending imperialist war, WWI with nukes and drones and missiles and global computer networks and figuratively-boiling oceans
Cuz poverty reduction is not socialism on its own and there's two ways "shift[ing] the productive forces in the global south into higher gear" cuz of higher living conditions (read: higher input costs for labor that makes profit go down) can go and that is along an imperialist or an anti-imperialist line cuz this exact thing is what led to the current imperialist world system happening. Is probably way too early to say and I should look into wtf China is up to in the third world with their development contracts but I REALLY don't like thinking about "Chinese funko pop factor[ies]" paying 2 whatevers currency units an hour and I think we should never be thinking that way is good cuz that is just imperialist surplus extraction done by someone other than a Burgerian lol and only leads to the same place even if a world war ran by the worst people on the planet doesn't blow us all up